Legendary journalist, ‘staunch supporter’ of Israel Steve Dunleavy, dies at 81

“When the first Gulf War broke out in 1991, Dunleavy hopped aboard a plane to Israel,” says Hannah Brown, who has worked for the New York Post and Jerusalem Post.

By World Israel News Staff 

Steve Dunleavy, described as a “hard-hitting, hard-drinking journalist who helped define The New York Post as a crime reporter, editor and premier columnist,” was being mourned by the newspaper Monday upon his death at the age of 81.

He was also being remembered in Israel.

“Dunleavy, an Australian who became Rupert Murdoch’s star reporter after the media mogul purchased the New York Post in 1976, was a staunch supporter of Israel,” wrote Hannah Brown in The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday. Brown had written for The New York Post before joining the Jerusalem newspaper.

“When the first Gulf War broke out in 1991, Dunleavy hopped aboard a plane to Israel,” she says. “He visited the country several times, including to report on the first Gulf War in 1991 and the 1996 elections,” Brown adds.

In its article about Dunleavy published on Monday, The New York Post praises him for his “countless exclusives, including interviews with the mother of Sirhan Sirhan, Robert F. Kennedy’s assassin, and confessed ‘Boston Strangler’ Albert DeSalvo.”

“His passing is the end of a great era,” Murdoch said, quoted in the paper.

Dunleavy began his career already at the age of 14 after he “quit school” and began working “as a copy boy at The Sun, a Sydney tabloid that employed his dad as a photographer,” says the New York Post in its obituary.

Brown recalls that in “a heartfelt column about how his son Peter was going overseas for the military just after the 9/11 terror attacks, he wrote, ‘I’m sick and tired of all this crap about suspending hostilities over Ramadan. Nobody suspended hostilities when Israel was attacked during Yom Kippur.’”