Shai Regev, 25: Gossip reporter who was ‘like a sunflower’
Murdered at the Supernova music festival, October 7
Shai Regev, 25, a gossip reporter from Ramat Yishai, was murdered by Hamas terrorists at the Supernova music festival near Re’im on October 7.
She attended the rave with her boyfriend, Nir Forti, who was also murdered that day. Her family said around 6:30 a.m. she told them about the rocket fire and around 8 a.m. she said they were trying to flee in a car, but were stuck in traffic. That was the last they heard from her.
For close to a week she was considered missing, until her body was found and identified. She was buried on October 15 in Ramat Yishai. She is survived by her parents, Efi and Ron, and her sister Nitzan.
Regev worked as an editor for TMI, the gossip and entertainment news section of the Ma’ariv newspaper. According to Haaretz, Shai and Nir had moved into an apartment together in Tel Aviv just three weeks before they were killed. Shai had worked for Maariv for three years and started working for TMI a year ago, while she was studying communications at the Open University.
“The cursed terrorists, animals, destroyed the life of our Shai — talented, creative and full of love,” said Ma’ariv editor-in-chief Golan Bar-Yosef in a statement. “We will always remember your magical smile.”
Noa Rachamim, a good friend of Regev who also worked as a TMI editor, said the staff “is struggling to accept and absorb this horrible news about the death of our Shai, who was a major pillar of all TMI activities and our success… Today we lost not just a dedicated professional but also a real friend and a huge light, whose loss we will feel with every word and letter we write.”
Regev’s final byline on TMI was on a story about Bruno Mars, the pop singer who performed in Israel just days before the Hamas massacre and was forced to cancel his sold-out Tel Aviv show planned for the evening of the attack.
Her sister, Nitzan, described her to TMI as “a sunflower, a sunflower pointing toward the sun and absorbing light. Like a sunflower, you absorbed light your whole life, but you were a unique sunflower, because you didn’t only know how to absorb, and you didn’t just take the light for yourself, but you gave it to me, to our parents, to everyone in their hearts like an arrow of hope. We will try to make sure that the light you absorbed… will go only to angels.”
Marking Israel’s “family day,” Shai’s mother, Efi Azoulay Regev, wrote on Facebook that “my family will never be perfect or whole again.”
“My Shaiki, I always told you guys that it was mother’s day, not family day,” she continued. “Today I’m prepared to accept that it’s family day, if you will only be here with us. The longing and the pain do not heal, they only grow from day to day, from hour to hour. I have a huge hole in my body and the air that I breathe doesn’t manage to stay, it gets sucked into that huge hole.”
Efi continued: “I told you, next to your beautiful headstone, that we have stayed a small, pained family but not destroyed. We will succeed, maybe, to get up and to live and maybe even to be happy. I’m trying Shaiki, really. But it’s so hard. I love you, my daughter, until the sky and the stars and the Milky Way.”
