Yossi Tahar, 39: Shin Bet officer and dad of 4 was a ‘super-warrior’
Killed on October 7 battling the Hamas attack on southern Israel
Yosef Hai “Yossi” Tahar, 39, a Shin Bet officer from Bitzaron, was killed on October 7 battling the Hamas attack on southern Israel.
His photo is barred from publication by the Shin Bet.
When Yossi realized the scale of the attack, he headed toward the front lines to help repel the Hamas invasion. When he got a call that a comrade was seriously wounded, he managed to get him in a helicopter to a hospital, saving his life.
Yossi then headed toward Kibbutz Mefalsim, where he heard a firefight was taking place. He battled with a number of Hamas gunmen until he was shot dead outside the kibbutz.
He was buried in Kfar Warburg. He is survived by his wife, Liat, their four children, twins Omer and Ziv, 8, Ron, 6 and Shahar, 5, his parents, Eli and Mazal and four of his siblings, Shai, Guy, Erez and Bar. His brother, Roi, was killed in 2001 in a motorcycle accident during his army service.
Yossi was named for his paternal uncle, Lt. Col. Yossi Tahar, who was killed in 1981 while fighting in Lebanon. His father, Eli, is the deputy director of Yad Lebanim, an organization for bereaved family members of fallen soldiers.
Born in Azrikam, a small town near Ashdod, Yossi was the fifth-oldest in the family, coming after four older brothers and ahead of his younger sister.
Yossi and Liat knew each other from high school, and began dating as teenagers in 2001 — ultimately staying together for close to 23 years and raising their four children in Bitzaron, a small town outside Ashdod.
In 2002, Yossi enlisted in the IDF, serving in the elite Shayetet 13 naval commando unit, according to a Shin Bet eulogy. Despite the tragedies to already hit his family, Yossi’s parents signed the forms allowing him to go into combat.
During his army service, he fought in both the Second Lebanon War and Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. In 2009, shortly after he was released from the IDF, Yossi joined the Shin Bet, in the operations unit. He held a number of different positions, advancing to be team leader, then a branch leader and eventually the deputy unit chief.
The Shin Bet said Yossi “was a curious person, smart, sensitive to his surroundings, loving, responsible, professional and dedicated. Yossi was… a brave and cool-headed person who did not easily back down.”
His wife, Liat, told Globes that she was told to break the bad news to her children by stressing that he was a hero — something they’d heard many times before.
“Because of his senior role, this was a sentence they heard all the time,” she said. “He wouldn’t be there on holidays, Shabbat or family events, because he’s saving the country.”
Liat said that “Yossi really was an indestructible person. With him I felt the most protected, and I can’t really comprehend [that he’s gone] — can’t or don’t want to.” His loss, she said, “will accompany us all of our lives. The kids are proud that their father is a hero, but they want a dad like all of their friends, not a dad in heaven.”
Yossi’s father, Eli, told Ynet that his son “swept people along with him, not necessarily because of his rank but because of his humanity. His constant saying was ‘walk with your head up and your nose down.'”
Eli said that Yossi was named after his late brother, “and my wife added the name ‘Hai’ [life] to protect him, but it didn’t help. I didn’t believe that he could be harmed — he was a super-warrior.”
“Yossi believed in what he was doing, he was at peace with what he was doing and he was killed because he was protecting his people,” he added. “The State of Israel owes him a lot.”
The Times of Israel Community.