Education Minister Yoav Kisch has announced that the Israel Prize, the country's highest civilian honor, will be awarded in all the usual categories this year, not just in the two new ones created after the October 7 attack, as previously reported.
In mid-February, Kisch announced that the traditional prize categories would be canceled this year, and two new categories related to the ongoing war against Hamas in Gaza would be awarded instead. The new categories are "Societal Responsibility" for civic efforts and volunteering and "Citizen Heroism" for civilian acts of bravery.
The move sparked sharp criticism. Numerous petitions demanded reversing the questionable decision to pare down categories drastically.
Kisch changed his previous opinion and decided to give the Israel Prize in the various categories alongside the new awards after talking with Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, who didn't defend his position at the High Court.
Earlier, journalist Ben Caspit reported that the true reason for scraping all of the Israel Prize's traditional categories this year was an attempt to avoid awarding the prize to Eyal Waldman. The Israeli tech giant is an outspoken critic of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government and one of the organizers of protests against legal reform in Israel. Waldman's daughter and her partner were among those murdered at the Nova music festival in Re'im.
