Late at night on July 1st, 1973, Colonel Yosef Alon and his wife, Devora, returned from an Israeli embassy party. They pulled into the driveway of their Bethesda, MD (5519 Trent St.) and exited the vehicle. Alon stopped for a second to grab his jacket from the back seat. Immediately after, a white sedan appeared and several shots were fired, five of which hit Yosef. He was dead, murder in his driveway in the presence of his wife. The normally peaceful, suburban community of Bethesda was rocked by a brazen act of terrorism in their backyard.
Alon was one of the first pilots in the Israeli Air Force, having been commissioned in 1951, and earlier that year he made a special trip back to Jerusalem to fly an F-4 fighter plane with his squadron in celebration of Israel’s 25th anniversary. He had been stationed in Washington for the last three years as the Israeli air and naval attaché, responsible for determining what military hardware was to be procured by his government.