The widow of an off-duty soldier who was murdered in a stabbing attack at a supermarket in Samaria last month published a harsh post on Facebook on Saturday night over the Defense Ministry's refusal to refer to her husband's death as "fell in battle." The ministry had decided that the headstone of Staff Sgt. Tuvia Yanai Weissman would say "killed in a terrorist attack." "Yanai, my love, who would have believed that only a little more than two weeks after you died as a hero in battle, I would have to fight against the worst of the insensitivity of the system? Instead of thinking about how to honor your memory, I'm forced to present the exact circumstances in which you were killed," Yael Weissman's post read. "The text on headstones comes in a few standard phrasings. There is 'fell in battle' and there is 'killed in a terrorist attack.' There was an investigation, and based on the conclusions that were sent to the Defense Ministry's Department of Families and Commemoration, it was decided that your headstone would read 'killed in a terrorist attack.' Yes, just a terrorist attack. No one questioned me and it's interesting whom they did question. Because they would only have to hear me, and the other eyewitnesses who were on the scene, or to watch the [footage from] the security cameras that recorded the incident, to determine that you fell in battle. If that wasn't a battle, what is? "You ran [toward the terrorists], you tried to get hold of them, as is expected from a combat soldier in the Israel Defense Forces. And now someone at the top of the hierarchy has decided there was no battle there. ... The Defense Ministry's Department of Families and Commemoration tells me that the decision isn't theirs -- it depends on the IDF, which submits the conclusions of the investigation. "The text 'fell in battle in a terrorist attack,' which I thought should appear on your headstone, isn't a luxury but accurately represents what happened. What do you think, my Yanai? I love you and miss you endlessly." The Defense Ministry said in response that it was "sorry for the Weissman family's heavy loss. The Department of Families and Commemoration operates according to the rules for standard headstone texts, and matches the [description of] the circumstances of the death to the information received from various security branches."
