Aviel Ron

Aviel Ron was born in 1948 in Haifa

Aviel Ron was born in 1948 in the Hadar neighborhood of Haifa. He attended the Hebrew Reali School and the first class of Ironi Hey high school, and was active in the Scouts.

He joined the Artillery Corps in 1966 and finished officers' course in 1968. In the War of Attrition he commanded batteries on the Bar Lev Line, and he left regular service in 1970. From 1970 to 1974 he studied geodesy at the Technion.

He was wounded in the Yom Kippur War and later returned to service. He worked in Iran from 1976 to 1978, then built and led an artillery battalion in the First Lebanon War and commanded the Ra'am formation from 1986 to 1991. He took part in developing the Sholef self-propelled gun, the Merkava 3 and a 120 mm tank gun, which earned him the Israel Defense Prize in 1998.

In 1994 he became director of the Survey of Israel. Under him a national geographic information system was set up and satellite navigation came into use for mapping. He also headed the committee that set the upper water line of the Sea of Galilee.

On 31 March 2002 he was killed with his children Anat and Ofer in a suicide bombing at the Matza restaurant in Haifa. In 2003 a national map and aerial photo archive was named after him.