81-year-old Sergey Gredeskul used to teach at Ben Gurion University
Notable theoretical physicist Sergey Gredeskul and his wife Viktoria were killed by Hamas militants at their home in southern Israel, Russian media outlets reported on Tuesday evening.
“On October 7, during a terrorist attack by Hamas militants, Sergei Andreevich Gredeskul and his wife were killed in their home in the city of Ofakim,” Alexey Khokhlov, member of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAN) posted on Telegram.
Khokhlov called Gredeskul “an outstanding theoretical physicist” who wrote more than 100 scientific articles and co-authored the ‘Introduction to the Theory of Disordered Systems’ in 1988.
Gredeskul was born in 1942 and taught in Kharkov (present-day Ukraine) before moving to Israel in 1991. Both he and his wife taught at Ben-Gurion University and retired in 2012.
Word of the Gredeskuls’ death was confirmed by David Erschler, a lecturer in the Linguistics Department at Ben-Gurion. He posted on X that the university had sent out emails listing the current and retired staff who had been killed, which included their names. Sergey was listed as professor emeritus in the Physics Department, while Viktoria was listed as professor emeritus in the Mathematics Department. Both were in their 80s, Erschler noted.
Another email mentioned the deaths of Yasmin Zohar from the Education Department, her father Haim Livneh, her husband Yaniv, and their daughters Keshet and Tchelet.
Hamas launched ‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ on Saturday, firing hundreds of rockets into Israel and sending militants deep into Israeli territory. Israel has responded by blockading the Gaza Strip and launching reprisal airstrikes into the Palestinian territory.
As of Tuesday afternoon, Israel has recorded at least 1,000 killed and 2,800 injured. Meanwhile, Palestinian authorities in Gaza have counted at least 830 dead and another 4,250 wounded since the outbreak of hostilities.
