Eli Moyal

Eli Moyal (Hebrew: אלי מויאל; 1953–2020) was an Israeli politician and the mayor of Sderot between 1998 and 2008.^[1]

Moyal was born in a village in Morocco in the early 1950s. He was probably born in 1953{{efn|At the time of his death in 2020, most sources reported his age as 67.^[1][2] In an interview in 2004 he said that he was born in a winter, some time between 1952 and 1955 (and his parents only remembered the date by the Weekly Torah portion, and that eventually the date Feb 28th 1951 was chosen.^[3] In a television interview in December 2017^[4][5] stated that according to family lore he was roughly 68 at the time. The family emigrated to Israel in 1957. At the age of 10 he was sent to a boarding school in Kfar Haroeh. Later he moved to Jerusalem and attended the Lifshitz College of Education and at the age of 17 he worked for a year as a teacher in his home town of Sderot.^[5]

After a military service, Moyal studied law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, graduated and opened an office in Jerusalem. In 1991, following the 1991 Iraqi missile attacks against Israel, he created a branch of his office in Sderot and eventually moved there.^[5]