Samuel Segev

Samuel Segev was born in 1926 in Tiberias

Samuel Segev was born in Tiberias in 1926 to Rivka and Moshe Sabbag. He studied at the School of Law and Economics in Tel Aviv.

He served in the Haganah and was wounded in the War of Independence, while also reporting on Arab affairs for the weekly Bamahane. After the war he became an intelligence officer and in the early 1950s commanded an open source intelligence unit, later named Hatzav.

In 1955 Maariv editor Arye Dissentshik hired him as the paper's Middle East correspondent. He worked for Maariv for 35 years, including as a foreign correspondent in Washington and Paris. He wrote many books, among them works on the Iran-Contra Affair, Israel and Morocco, and the spy Eli Cohen, and translated books from Arabic and French.

After leaving Maariv he lived in Winnipeg, Canada, wrote for the Winnipeg Free Press, and was a visiting professor at Hofstra University in New York. He married Miri Rosenthal, with whom he had 2 sons, and later married Phyllis. He died of cancer in Tel Aviv in 2012 and was buried in Kiryat Shaul cemetery.