Ziva David
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Officer Ziva David (pronounced "da-veed") is a fictional character in the TV series NCIS played by Cote de Pablo. The character joined the series at the start of its third season in the fall of 2005.
Ziva is a Mossad agent assigned to the NCIS following the murder of Special Agent Caitlin Todd by a rogue Mossad operative named Ari Haswari. Lead NCIS agent Jethro Gibbs does not agree with the assignment at first but comes to accept Ziva as one of his team. Soon after her assignment to NCIS, she kills Haswari in order to save Gibbs' life; it is revealed afterwards that she is Ari's half-sister and Gibbs falsifies his report to indicate that he, not Ziva, killed Ari.
Ziva's father is a Mossad Deputy Director. She is an expert marksman and carries two firearms and a knife at all times. She is seen as a type of an assassin by Timothy McGee. In fact, Ziva was trained as an assassin by the Mossad, however, it is not clear whether she ever operated in this capacity. She also appears to not be adverse to using deadly force, often threatening same during interrogations (leading to at least one incident in which she is accused of killing a suspect in custody). She frequenty brags of her abilities as a Mossad agent (such as rapelling down a cliff without safety ropes, and swimming three miles in freezing water at night.) She particularly taunts Anthony DiNozzo in much the same way Caitlin Todd did before she was killed (and some parts of Ziva's personality disturb him, like the fact that she sleeps with a gun in her hand). Nonetheless she and DiNozzo share an almost brother-sister relationship (as opposed to the implied romantic interest DiNozzo shared with her predecessor) to the point of the two pulling pranks on each other and acting childishly.
When Ziva first comes to NCIS she believes that resident lab tech Abby does not like her (she is partially correct in this assumption.) However, Abby comes to accept Ziva as one of the team and believes that since she is basically a trained killer, she can take care of herself. Nonetheless, when Gibbs is critically injured in the third season episode "Hiatus", Ziva and Abby come to blows when Abby accuses Ziva of not caring about Gibbs' condition; afterwards, Ziva is shown regretting her apparent inability to show the same level of concern as the others. In the following episode it's revealed that Ziva has harbored regret at having killed her half-brother when she experiences an emotional breakdown while trying to help restore Gibbs' memory (her breakdown actually assists Gibbs in regaining it).
Ziva is particularly close to NCIS Director Jenny Shepherd, with whom she has worked in the past, and on numerous occasions has been shown confiding in Shepherd, particularly if she is upset by one of Gibbs' tactics.
One ongoing idiosyncracy Ziva possesses is her tendency to misuse English idioms, much to the amusement of her teammates. Those malapropisms are sometimes referred to as Ziva-isms by fans of the TV series. Occasionally Ziva will get an idiom correct, much to her satisfaction (though on at least one occasion DiNozzo has teased her by making her think she'd gotten it wrong).
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