Samuel Boikaner, a 30-year-old Israeli medical student, was killed by a wild elephant in the Chitwan National Park in Nepal last Friday.
Boikaner was in Nepal as part of an Israeli delegation of doctors from Ben-Gurion University volunteering at a local hospital.
According to eyewitness reports, Boikaner entered the park by himself, riding a bicycle, and began taking pictures.
At some point, he was attacked from behind by an elephant and died on the spot. His body was found some 600 meters away from the park's headquarters. An Israeli driver's license recovered from the body helped authorities identify him.
Local reports noted that eight people have been killed by wild animals in the park in the past six months, two of them, including Boikaner, by elephants.
Boikaner is survived by two parents, both of whom are doctors, and two younger siblings.
"He was due to graduate in two months," Boikaner's mother Tatiana said.
"He came to medicine because he saw this service as a mission. He studied hard and really wanted to become a doctor. His whole life was devoted to giving. That's why he went to Nepal, to volunteer at a local hospital with a delegation of doctors from Ben-Gurion University.
It's a disaster and hard to grasp that now, of all times, at the end of his strenuous studies, during a volunteer mission, he found his death."