Mor Shemali, widowed in the Alexandria shooting, dies three years on

Mor Shemali, an Israeli woman whose husband Alon was killed in front of her in an attack in Egypt three years ago, has died, the Israeli news site Ynet reported. Alon Shemali was shot by an Egyptian police officer in the coastal city of Alexandria, one day after the massacre in southern Israel, on a date Ynet gives as 8/10.

The Israeli broadcaster N12 also reported her death in a brief news update, noting that her husband Alon had been murdered before her eyes in the attack in Egypt. According to Ynet, she had not been herself since the killing, and her parents told the outlet that her spirit had effectively been killed in Egypt along with her husband.

The attack in Alexandria

Alexandria is Egypt's second city, a port on the Mediterranean coast west of the Nile Delta and a destination for foreign visitors, including Israelis. Egypt was the first Arab state to sign a peace treaty with Israel, and Israeli tourists travel there, though Israeli authorities have long issued travel warnings for the country.

Ynet's account says the man who opened fire was an Egyptian policeman, and that the shooting took place the day after the massacre. In Israeli usage, "the massacre" refers to the Hamas-led assault on communities and military posts in southern Israel that started the war in Gaza. The attack in Alexandria came while Israel was still absorbing the scale of that assault, and it was one of the first incidents in which Israelis abroad were targeted in its immediate aftermath.

The reports used for this article do not describe the wider attack in detail, such as how many people were hurt or killed alongside Alon Shemali, or what happened to the officer afterwards. Those details are left out here for that reason.

Three years after the shooting

Ynet described the period since the attack as one in which Mor Shemali lived on but did not truly live, a phrase the outlet attributed to those close to her. N12 headlined its item with words addressed to her, to the effect that she had already been gone for three years.

According to Ynet, in January she wrote a message describing herself as physically present but absent in every other sense, and saying that the bullet that struck her husband's heart had struck hers too. Ynet reported that at the time of that message she intended to end her life through medically assisted suicide in Switzerland. In the same message, the outlet reported, she asked people to remember her as she had been before the attack and not to hold on to anger.

Switzerland is one of a small number of countries where assisted dying is legally permitted under defined conditions, and it is known for accepting people who travel there from abroad for that purpose.

How the news was reported

The news was carried within minutes on the evening it broke. Ynet's alerts channel on Telegram posted a short notice of her death, linking to a fuller article on the Ynet site. N12, the news division associated with Israel's Channel 12, published its own short item shortly afterwards. Both organisations framed the story around the same fact: that she had watched her husband being killed and that her death came three years later.

Families of victims of terror attacks in Israel often speak publicly about the long aftermath for survivors and relatives, and the statement from her parents, as reported by Ynet, placed her death within that aftermath rather than treating it as a separate event.

What the reports do not say

None of the reports states where or how Mor Shemali died. Ynet reported her intention, expressed in January, to seek assisted suicide in Switzerland, but neither Ynet nor N12 says whether she went ahead with that plan, and this article does not assume that she did.

The reports also do not give her age, the date or place of a funeral, or details of any surviving relatives beyond her parents. They do not say whether Israeli authorities recognised her as a victim of the attack in her own right, and they do not add new information about the Alexandria shooting itself.

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