Iris Haim remembers the day the Israel Defense Forces came knocking with news about her missing son.

Yotam, a heavy metal drummer who was kidnapped from their kibbutz in southern Israel, had been shot dead in Gaza.

He had somehow broken free from his captors and hidden among the rubble for five days before Israeli soldiers mistook him for a Hamas operative and opened fire.

The officers at her home allowed the news to sink in for around half an hour before one whispered in her ear: “Iris, do you want them to take sperm from Yotam?”

“I was very surprised,” she told The Telegraph. “I asked my husband, and we immediately said yes.”

Within a few hours, doctors were able to retrieve Yotam’s sperm, 10 vials of which are now frozen in storage a year after his death. With any luck, his child – Iris’s grandchild – will be carried to term inside a friend of the family.