Media personality and statistician Professor Camille Fox passed away today (Wednesday) at the age of 78. Fox was News 13’s commentator in all election campaigns in the last 20 years and accompanied the news as a commentator during the war in Gaza as well. He left behind a wife and two children.
Fox, one of Israel’s top surveyors, served as a principal researcher at the “Dialogue” research institute from 2015. His main research areas dealt with variable quality, sampling and surveys, statistics in medicine and genetics, as well as social statistics. Most of his academic research focused on the theory of sampling and surveys, and research in the field of medicine and clinical trials.
Fox was born in Bucharest, Romania and immigrated to Israel with his family in 1960. After his service in the IDF as a truck driver (Fox completed his high school studies at Ben Shemen Youth Village, with an agricultural matriculation certificate), he completed his bachelor’s degree in economics and statistics, and then went on to earn a master’s degree in performance research and a doctorate in statistics – all at Tel Aviv University.
Fox’s colleague at News 13, Raviv Drucker, told about him in the channel’s main edition: “He functioned until the last moment. I have a million stories about Camille. Everyone knows he was a funny and terribly human person and tells everything, but where did you see his professionalism until the end ? Mainly because he was locked up, he had a kind of two Camilles – there was the Camille who prepares the sample, who would look stressed, and you would say ‘Will he survive this? Will there be numbers at the end?’ Everyone is under pressure, all the pressure is on him, but at some point he would lock up – ‘these are the results’, and that’s it, you don’t move him.”
Drucker also added: “In the first sample of the first elections in April 2019, nothing could have been more different from the two channels, on the second channel they said there was a tie, that maybe Benny Gantz is prime minister and not Bibi after all these years, you can imagine that I was not the saddest person in Israel from the competing sample, Camille gave the complete opposite, that Bibi won a sweeping victory. You expected him to be a little sleepy. Nothing, and he was right, to the milliliter. I saw him even when he was wrong, but he doesn’t discount himself.”
Tamar Ish Shalom, Fox’s colleague for News 13, wrote this evening on X (former Twitter): “Menesh has left us. Professional, meticulous, with a smile that was a hallmark (perhaps except for the closing minutes of the sample when everyone is busy). One of the rare ones who take their work seriously Abyssal and themselves in light amusement.”
Mench left us. Professional, meticulous, with a smile that was a hallmark (perhaps except for the closing tests of the model when everything is on).
One of the rare ones who take their work with abysmal seriousness and themselves with light amusement.
Prof. Camille Fox 1945-2024 pic.twitter.com/Ecj4qdfSm4— Tamar Ish Shalom תמר (@tamarishshalom) April 3, 2024
In a message to News 13 employees about Fox’s death, CEO Or Tselkovnik wrote: “This is a sad evening for the news company. Professor Camille Fox, the statistician, pollster for News 13, passed away at the age of 78. Camille accompanied the channel professionally and exclusively during the last 20 years in polls and kept his hand on the pulse of the election systems in Israel for generations, meticulously, professionally and with first-rate reliability. With his departure, Camille leaves behind a large void, professional and human. On behalf of all the employees of the news company, I send my condolences and deep participation in the family’s grief.”
Did you find a language mistake?
