TEL AVIV: Yaniv Zohar, a former Associated Press video journalist, who covered conflicts and major news in his native country for three decades, was killed in his home during Hamas’ bloody cross-border rampage on October 7 along with his wife and two daughters. He was 54.
Zohar worked for the AP’s Israel bureau for 15 years, from 2005 to 2020, covering all the major news events in the country. But his area of expertise was the intermittent warfare on the doorstep of his home in the Nahal Oz kibbutz near the border with the Gaza Strip.
Zohar was often the first to alert the news desk of violence nearby and the first to arrive on the scene.
Most notably, he was deeply involved in coverage of the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 and was the first newsperson on the scene of the abduction of Israeli soldier Gilad Schalit by Palestinian militants the following year.
“Yaniv was AP’s eyes and ears in southern Israel, always among the first to respond to news in the busy region,” AP Executive Editor Julie Pace said.
In recent years, Zohar worked as a photographer for the Israel Hayom daily newspaper.
He found his death in perhaps the most devastating sight of them all, as at least 2,000 Hamas militants infiltrated from Gaza and in gruesome fashion killed more than 1,400 Israelis in the deadliest attack in the country’s 75-year history.
Zohar and his family were on the frontline of the massacre in their border Kibbutz. He was killed along with his wife, Yasmin, 49, and his two daughters, Tehelet, 20, and Keshet, 18. Zohar’s 13-year-old son Ariel, who had gone for an early-morning jog, escaped alive.
An estimated 1,000 people attended Zohar’s funeral on Tuesday in central Israel, where the service was interrupted four times by air-raid sirens and incoming rocket fire from Gaza. Israel’s Iron Dome defence system could be seen interrupting rockets in the sky above.
According to Jewish tradition, burials take place as soon as possible. But it took 10 days before Zohar and his family could be laid to rest because of a backlog due to the sheer numbers of victims and because of the lengthy DNA process required to identify all the bodies.
Zohar’s sister Sivan said the repeated air-raid sirens prevented mourners from completing their eulogies.
“They won’t even let us bury our dead,” she said, her voice shaking. “They broke into their home and murdered all these good, innocent people in cold blood.”
For her father, an 89-year-old Holocaust survivor, she said the experience was like a “second Holocaust”.
She said Zohar’s son would be raised by her sister and that the family planned to go ahead with his bar mitzvah ceremony in a month. “We will continue to celebrate life, and we won’t let anyone destroy us. This is how we will avenge their deaths,” she said.
Sivan described her brother as a devoted journalist whose images of the region reached across the world, and as a man of peace who believed in coexistence.