By ToI Staff
18 August 2026, 10:07 am
Single mother shocked when DNA test she performed abroad found newborn and his older brother don’t have same biological father, lawyers say
A woman who conceived from donor sperm at Assuta Medical Center in north Tel Aviv performed a DNA test abroad that indicated her child was fathered by the wrong man, the Health Ministry said Monday, citing a report from the hospital.
It is the third sperm mix-up scandal to hit Assuta, Israel’s largest private hospital network, which had pledged to reform its operations after previous errors.
According to Channel 12, the woman is a single mother who had been in fertility treatment at Assuta for about three years and had selected one donor whose sperm she would use to have children.
She has had two boys, the second of whom was born this month. When the mother noticed her sons did not resemble each other, she underwent the DNA test, which showed the children had different biological fathers, Channel 12 said.
The mother’s “world came crashing down” upon discovering she had a child from the sperm of an unidentified man, without knowing “his genetic and health data, characteristics and personality, including his religion,” the network quoted the mother’s lawyers telling the Health Ministry.
In a statement to Channel 12, the Assuta hospital said it had begun an “in-depth investigation” into the matter and that “at this stage, it is impossible to reach conclusions and additional investigation is necessary.” The hospital said it was in touch with both the mother and the Health Ministry.
The ministry said it was looking into the DNA test and the private lab that performed it, and that “the incident is being probed professionally with Assuta Medical Centers.”
The same hospital, in Tel Aviv’s Ramat Hahayal neighborhood, was temporarily barred in 2023 from performing in-vitro fertilization after it mistakenly fertilized a woman’s eggs with sperm from a man other than her partner.
A 2024 Health Ministry report found the same hospital had failed to inform authorities about that mistake and about others in which women’s eggs were ruined.
In 2022 another Assuta hospital, in Rishon Lezion, implanted a woman with an embryo from another couple, triggering a three-year court battle over the legal custody of the girl who was born. In 2025, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the birth mother and her partner, but approved a legal framework for the biological parents to maintain close contact with the child.