Veteran journalist and television personality Dan Margalit has died at the age of 87.
His daughter, Shira Margalit, announced on social media that her father passed away at his home in Tel Aviv after an illness, surrounded by family. She described him as a devoted family man, a lover of people, a journalist and writer, a Zionist, and someone who cherished the Land of Israel with all his heart.
Margalit was born in 1938 in Tel Aviv. He studied at the Herzliya Hebrew Gymnasium and in his youth wrote for the newspaper Herut. Between 1964 and 1991, he worked as a journalist at Haaretz.
He gained particular prominence in 1977, when, as the paper's Washington correspondent, he exposed the Dollar Account Affair, showing that Rabin's wife had maintained an active overseas account in the US despite the law prohibiting such assets at the time. The revelation forced then-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin to drop out of the Knesset race, resulting in the appointment of Shimon Peres as the Labor Party's nominee for prime minister. Peres went on to lose to Menachem Begin, leader of Likud.
