Tel Aviv (Israel), October 18(Press Ki Taquat)
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.
“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’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.
