Widow of slain off-duty soldier insists he was no victim

The widow of an off-duty soldier stabbed to death in a West Bank supermarket nearly three weeks ago is protesting a Defense Ministry decision to categorize him as a terror victim, rather than as a soldier who fell in battle.

Yael Weissman said Sunday that the ministry had concluded a probe of the February 18 attack, and ruled that her husband, Tuvia Yanai Weissman, 21, would be described as a terror victim rather than a fallen soldier on his gravestone at Jerusalem’s Mount Herzl military cemetery.

According to her account, the couple and their baby were on the other 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 killed by one of the stabbers. Following his death, the army said off-duty soldiers would begin taking their weapons home on leave, a decision hailed by Weissman, who maintained she didn’t blame the army for his death although her husband’s request to take his gun home with him had been denied.

“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 said.

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 Abba [dad] fell in an attack, if there was a battle there?'”

While Weissman said she would continue to protest the decision, she indicated she would relent rather than leave his grave unmarked.

In response, the Defense Ministry offered condolences to Yael Weissman, but said it was operating in accordance with its internal guidelines on memorializing soldiers.