Television personality Lucy Aharish gave birth to a baby boy on Wednesday, with her husband, Fauda star Tsahi Halevi, at Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center.
The website Pnai Plus published photos during the day of the couple entering the hospital and later reported that Aharish gave birth to a son. They announced her pregnancy last September.
Aharish and Halevi stirred controversy when they revealed in 2018 that they had wed, after years of keeping their relationship a secret, because she is Muslim and he is Jewish. However, social media on Wednesday was filled with congratulations for the couple from family, friends and fans. This was in contrast to the reaction to the announcement of their marriage, which was greeted with happiness by some but with messages of hate over their mixed marriage from many others.Some Israelis scolded her for not converting to Judaism, while former MK Oren Hazan said Halevi had become “Islamicized” and had taken his role as a counterterrorist on Fauda who goes undercover as an Arab too seriously.
Ever since, they have found themselves the focus of intense scrutiny. In the summer of 2019, when Halevi’s movie, the comedy Mossad, had its premiere, people noticed that Aharish was wearing a loose-fitting dress that many thought might be concealing a pregnancy. Aharish, 39, addressed those rumors on Facebook, stating that she was not pregnant. She wrote that she has had two miscarriages in the past year and hoped fervently for a successful pregnancy.Although she is slender, she said the reason her stomach was not flat is because of an operation she had at 13 to remove an ovary.She also noted that while so many had been against their marriage, now everyone seemed to want to see her pregnant. “It’s come to a situation where I’ve had to deny again and again that I’m pregnant, which is absurd! Get out of my womb!” she wrote in 2019.
Halevi, 45, has a son from a previous marriage. He is currently starring in the popular police drama on Channel 12, Line in the Sand, about corruption in Nahariya. There is no word yet on the baby's name.In 2020, the two appeared on the Israeli version of the television show, The Masked Singer, in which singers perform wearing elaborate masks and a panel has to guess their identities. Halevi, dressed as a rooster, won the season while Aharish, playing a stork, kept the judges guessing for weeks. The public accepted them as birds more easily than as husband and wife.