Off-duty soldier slain in supermarket to be recognized as combat casualty

An off-duty IDF soldier who was stabbed to death as he fought a knife-wielding Palestinian terrorist with his bare hands is to be memorialized as having fallen in combat and not as a victim of terror, following a request from his widow.

Yael Weissman had protested a Defense Ministry decision to categorize her husband Tuvia Yanai Weissman, 21, as a terror victim rather than as a soldier who fell during battle.

Following the intervention of MK Elazar Stern from the Yesh Atid party, the ministry reconsidered the matter and decided that Weissman’s gravestone at Jerusalem’s Mount Herzl military cemetery will include either the phrase “fell in battle during a terror attack” or “fell in battle.”

The couple and their baby were shopping at the Rami Levy supermarket in the Sha’ar Binyamin industrial park, north of Jerusalem, on February 18. They were on the far side of the supermarket when two Palestinian teenagers entered the store and began stabbing shoppers. Weissman, who was not armed, ran to help and was fatally stabbed.

Following his death, the army said off-duty soldiers would begin taking their weapons home on leave. The decision was hailed by Yael Weissman, who said her husband’s request to take his gun home with him had been denied. She stressed that she did not blame the army for his death.

“Yanai, my love,” she wrote on Facebook on Sunday. “Who would have thought that just a little over two weeks from the day you died a hero’s death, I would have to deal with the system’s obstinacy at its worst.”

Weissman wrote that the Defense Ministry had probed the incident, but “no one asked me any questions, and I wonder who they did ask.

“It would have been enough to hear my testimony, that of the witnesses there, or to watch the security footage of the incident — that would be sufficient to declare that you fell in battle. And if that wasn’t a battle, what is?” she asked.

Weissman told Army Radio on Monday that Israel “must give him this last honor, that the truth be displayed on his gravestone.”

“I also owe it to my daughter, who will grow up and ask me what happened there. I don’t want her to ask me why it says something incorrect on the gravestone, ‘Why does it say that dad fell in an attack, if there was a battle there?'”

Before changing its stance on the text, the Defense Ministry had said it was operating in accordance with its internal guidelines on memorializing soldiers.