Oren Nahari

Oren Nahari was born in Haifa in October 1955 and grew up in the city. His father, David "Dudik" Nahari, was a career army officer who served as head of the bureau of Chief of Staff David Elazar and later worked for the Mossad. His mother, Tamar, was a piano teacher from the Krymchak community. He graduated from the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa and served in intelligence roles in the Israel Defense Forces.

After his military service he studied political science and international relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. While a student he worked as a security officer at Israeli television, where a childhood friend recruited him to the sports department.

Nahari began his journalism career in 1980 in the sports department of Israeli television's Channel 1. In 1985 he moved to the news division as a foreign affairs reporter. In 1988 he was one of the founders of the weekly foreign affairs programme Roim Olam, and from 1993 he served as foreign news editor of Channel 1. In 2000 he co-founded the programme Globus with David Witztum and became its editor. He was also one of the presenters of the late night news programme Mehayom Lemahar.

In the field he covered South Africa's first democratic elections, the Rwandan genocide, ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and the September 11 attacks. He interviewed Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, Vaclav Havel and George W. Bush.

From 2007 to 2013 he co-presented The International Hour on Reshet Bet radio. In 2013 he won the Smoler Joint Prize for his long service to journalism. He left the Israel Broadcasting Authority at the end of 2016 and became a commentator and editor at Walla News. He wrote columns for Haaretz, Globes and other publications, lectured at Tel Aviv University, and wrote and edited best-selling non-fiction books, among them an encyclopaedic atlas of the world and a historical atlas.

In May 2023 he began presenting a weekly two-hour programme on Kan Reshet Bet, whose second hour was the history podcast A Year in an Hour, covering events since 1900. In 2026 he also presented the podcast The American Experiment with Eran Sikurel to mark 250 years of United States independence.

Nahari lived in Ramat Gan. He was married for the second time to the poet and poetry scholar Dr. Vered Ariel-Nahari, and was the father of four. In March 2026 he spoke openly about his ALS diagnosis, telling Israel Hayom that he felt sadness rather than anger about what he would not get to do.

Oren Nahari died on 13 August 2026 at the age of 70 from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), which he had disclosed in March 2026. His family announced his death. His final radio programme, recorded in late July, aired on Kan Reshet Bet on 8 August 2026, five days before he died. In it he said: "Keep looking, listening and asking questions, and don't take things for granted."

President Isaac Herzog expressed his profound sorrow. Kan, the Israel Public Broadcasting Corporation, called him one of the most prominent symbols of public broadcasting in Israel. His funeral was held on the day of his death.

Nahari is remembered as the journalist who shaped how foreign news was covered on Israeli public broadcasting, from the founding of Roim Olam in 1988 to his years as Channel 1's foreign news editor. His radio programmes and podcasts brought twentieth-century history to a new generation of listeners, and his reference books remain widely read. A documentary series on Meyer Lansky in which he was interviewed began airing on Kan 11 two days after his death.