Tsuri Sagi

Tsuri Sheinkin was born on 4 August 1934 in Herzliya, Mandatory Palestine, to Mordechai and Froma Sheinkin. His father came from Latvia and his mother from Poland, and both were among the founders of kibbutz Shefayim. After World War II the family moved to Moshav Ein Vered, east of Netanya, where he worked in the fields.

In a 2024 interview he remembered a childhood spent roaming open country around Herzliya: floating in laundry tubs on a nearby swamp, exploring a Roman tunnel by candlelight in search of bats and climbing a hill covered in cyclamen. He also recalled firing at the Iraqi army as a 14-year-old during the 1948 War of Independence.

Sagi's schooling before the army is not documented in detail in public sources. In the IDF he completed paratrooper combat training, an infantry squad commanders' course and officers' school. After commanding the Solomon Region in Sinai (1977 to 1980), he studied for a year at Israel's National Security College. He also served for a period as an instructor at the IDF Command and Staff College after returning from Kurdistan in the mid-1970s.

Sagi enlisted in 1952 and volunteered for the 35th Paratroopers Brigade, adopting the Hebrew surname Sagi. As a sergeant and platoon commander in the 890th Battalion he became known for bold cross-border reconnaissance, and he took part in the reprisal operations of the 1950s under Ariel Sharon and Rafael Eitan. During one reconnaissance mission near Deir al-Balah he and a partner ambushed a tent of Egyptian soldiers and survived heavy fire. Retired general Amos Yaron said at his funeral that Sagi was the one who evacuated the wounded Raful (Rafael Eitan) from the battlefield.

In the 1956 Sinai Campaign he commanded Company C of the 890th Battalion and fought at the Mitla Pass. From 1959 to 1960 he commanded the paratroopers' reconnaissance unit, then served as brigade intelligence officer, trained Ethiopian army officers on a mission to Ethiopia, and was deputy commander of the airborne Nahal battalion. From 1963 to 1965 he commanded the 890th Battalion. Then IDF chief of staff Yitzhak Rabin praised his handling of one raid: "It was a good performance in accordance with the objectives that were set."

In July 1965 Sagi was sent to Tehran to train Iranian special forces in the raiding, urban warfare and sabotage methods of the Israeli reprisal operations, and he helped organize the defense of oil installations in Khuzestan and the Persian Gulf. After his funeral in 2026, mourner Itai Vered wrote that Sagi had been among the planners of the defense of Kharg Island.

At Iran's request and with Mossad approval he then turned to the Kurds of northern Iraq. Realizing that the Kurds faced a conventional offensive by six Iraqi brigades at Geli Ali Beg rather than a guerrilla war, he designed a defensive plan around mountain terrain and Kurdish marksmanship with Brno rifles, plus a 1,000-man assault reserve. Kurdish commanders trained in Tehran and then in Israel near Daliyat al-Karmel. In winter 1966 Mossad chief Meir Amit sent him into Iraqi Kurdistan with Persian-speaking agent Maki Evron. Because Mustafa Barzani could not read a map, Sagi laid out the plan with the commanders' shoes, each one representing a mountain.

When the Iraqi offensive came in May 1966 and Sagi was ordered home, he refused. He lured the Iraqi 4th Brigade into an ambush on Mount Handrin, where it was destroyed in about an hour, with roughly 3,000 Iraqi dead according to several accounts. Two more brigades sent in after it also suffered heavy losses. A follow-up move to Mount Korek threatened to trap the Iraqi force, and Baghdad sent officers under white flags to negotiate Kurdish autonomy. Barzani gave him a seven-month-old Syrian brown bear, Shamo, which was later flown to Israel and placed in the Tel Aviv Zoo.

In 1974 Mossad head Zvi Zamir sent him back, telling him, "Your friend Mullah Mustafa is in serious trouble." Posing as a British journalist, Sagi organized flexible defenses and anti-tank ambushes against two Iraqi armored divisions and a dozen infantry brigades. The Kurds repelled four attack waves before the March 1975 Algiers Agreement between Iran and Iraq ended outside support and the Kurdish front collapsed. In the 2012 documentary Sealed Lips he said 12,000 Iraqi soldiers were killed and described a Mossad book bomb, built at his request by an expert called Natan, that was sent to Saddam Hussein but killed another senior official.

Sagi served in the airborne force assigned to Sharm el-Sheikh in the 1967 Six-Day War, then became deputy commander of the Paratroopers Brigade (1967 to 1968) and fought at Karameh in Jordan. He was operations officer of Central Command during the War of Attrition, commanded the 5th Reserve Infantry Brigade (1969 to 1971) and the 820th Regional Brigade (1971 to October 1973). On the eve of the Yom Kippur War he took over the Meron district on the Lebanese border, and after the war he led the 317th Reserve Paratroopers Brigade in the Syrian enclave until the 1974 disengagement.

Promoted to brigadier general in 1977, he commanded the Solomon Region at Sharm el-Sheikh until 1980, where he trained female soldiers as mortar crews and drew live ammunition from emergency stores without permission. When Raful Eitan tested the base with a surprise drill, the result so impressed him that he approved the ammunition retroactively and sent officers to study Sagi's defense plan. Sagi's final post was commander of the 81st Division. He retired in 1984 after 32 years of service.

Sagi married Tzipa, a native of Moshav Kfar Hess, and after leaving the army he returned to farming there. Work on the land, he said, replaced physical training and reflected the values of his military life. He also lived in Ramat Gan, in what Amos Yaron called the paratroopers' neighborhood. The couple had one son, Yair Sagi, a longtime photojournalist for Ynet and Yedioth Ahronoth. His grandchildren Zohar and Dror called him "a walking history book." He was a central member of a group of old comrades called the "Ainda gang," who met monthly to sing songs of the land of Israel.

Sagi prized independent judgment. Recalling paratrooper "water discipline" in 1952, he wrote that he learned "It's true that the military decides, but first you do what you think is right." He said the principles that guided him were "reason and need, even if those deviated from the bureaucratic rules of the IDF." He opposed the 1982 Lebanon War, a stance that historian Uri Milstein believed cost him higher command.

In a 2024 interview with JNS, at 90, he urged Israel to stop fearing the Islamic Republic of Iran, suggested pressure on Kharg Island, and argued that removing Iran's leaders would bring down the regime. He remained warmly attached to the Kurds, saying, "They are my friends."

Sagi is remembered in Israel and among Iraqi Kurds as the officer whose planning helped the Peshmerga defeat the Iraqi army in 1966 and resist it in 1974, a key chapter in decades of quiet Israeli and Kurdish cooperation that contributed to Kurdish autonomy. Yaakov Nimrodi devoted a chapter of his memoir Days of Tehran to him, titled "Tsuri Sagi Defeats the Iraqi Army." Uri Milstein compared his battlefield intuition to Napoleon's. At his funeral Amos Yaron called him "a legend from the generation of giants of the IDF."

In 2012 the city of Ramat Gan named him a Yakir, an honored citizen. Public sources do not list formal state decorations. His testimony on the Yom Kippur War, given to the Agranat Commission's researchers in April 1974, is preserved by the IDF archive's Yom Kippur War project.

Sagi's Hebrew memoir, My Wars alongside the Kurds in Iraq and Other Stories (Steimatzky, 2017), was written with Dr. Shaul Webber. He appeared in Yarin Kimor's 2012 documentary Sealed Lips about Mossad chief Yitzhak Hofi, on the Knesset Channel program There Were Days (2017), in a three-part oral history for the ToldotYisrael archive, and in a series of filmed conversations with historian Uri Milstein. He gave long interviews to Maariv (2019) and JNS (2024).

His account in Sealed Lips of a 1970s Mossad book-bomb attempt on Saddam Hussein, which killed another Iraqi official, drew international coverage in 2012. Some obituaries in August 2026 misstated his rank as lieutenant colonel; he retired as a brigadier general.

Sagi died on the morning of Wednesday, 19 August 2026, at the age of 92. The place and cause of death were not made public. He was buried on 20 August in the cemetery at Tel Mond. Hundreds attended, including Moshe Ya'alon, Tal Russo, Uri Sagi, Yitzhak Mordechai, Yoram Yair, Amos Yaron, Matan Vilnai, former police commissioner Assaf Hefetz, Omri Sharon, Hilik Magnus and generations of paratroopers. His widow Tzipa told mourners, "Tzuri loved you in his way, and he loved the country very much." His son Yair recalled his father's advice: "Be with friends, always help everyone."