Tareq Khatib, 44: Garbage truck driver and devoted father of 3

Tareq Khatib, 44, from Ofakim, was murdered by Hamas terrorists in the city on October 7.

With the start of the attack, Tareq and his family awoke, and took shelter in their bathroom, as they did not have a bomb shelter. About a half hour after the sirens began, his mother called and said they should come and stay with her, since she had a reinforced room, but they decided to stay home and wait it out instead.

Tareq nevertheless decided to go check up on his mother, worried that she was alone during the sirens, and set out on his electric bike around 7:20 a.m., according to a municipal eulogy. When his wife, Rivka, heard that there was a terrorist invasion of Ofakim, she called Tareq and heard screaming before the call was cut off.

Tareq was shot dead in the street by a cell of Hamas terrorists. Around 11 a.m., Tareq’s brother sent Rivka a video showing his body lying in the street next to his bike. At 3 a.m. Sunday morning, Rivka brought her children to her mother’s house and went to Tareq’s body, finding him riddled with 12 bullet holes, and sat with him until first responders were able to evacuate him and 13 other bodies who were lying in the same area.

He was buried in Rahat several days later. He is survived by his wife, Rivka, their three children, Liam, 10, Leeham, 8 and Barel, 2 months, as well as his mother, Karima, and his five siblings — Muhammad, Jihad, Zahed, Khalil and Etidal. Four of the siblings live in Israel, while one lives in Gaza.

Born in Egypt, Tareq moved to Israel when he was 7, settling with his family in the Bedouin town of Rahat in the south, according to a state eulogy. After finishing school, he began working as a garbage truck driver for the Ashkelon municipality.

He met Rivka Baruch, and the couple built a life together, having three children and settling in the Jewish town of Ofakim. (He was buried in Rahat as the Ofakim cemetery doesn’t have a Muslim section.)

The couple’s youngest, Barel Zohar, was not yet two months old when Tareq was killed. She was named in honor of Barel Shmueli, a Border Police officer who was shot and killed along the Gaza border fence in 2021. “At least he got to meet her, to be at her birth, to be with her a little bit,” said Rivka in video testimony about the attack.

“He was an incredibly wonderful person, a man who loved justice,” Rivka told Ynet. “He never did wrong to anybody in his whole life. He didn’t deserve this.”

He was a devoted family man and a lover of animals, his loved ones said, caring for and rehabilitating dogs who had suffered abuse.

“My son Tareq, he worked for the municipality, on the garbage truck, he went from work to home and home to work, he never went anywhere else,” Karima said in video testimony. “If he went anywhere else it was to come to me or to his brother… He just had a baby, six weeks old. It’s hard, so hard. A mother who buries her child while she’s still alive — it’s better if she dies.”

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