Alona Turel was born Alona Turkovitz on March 17, 1944, in Ramat Gan, and grew up in the Borochov neighborhood of Givatayim, where her family was among the neighborhood's founding generation. Self-taught on piano from childhood and classically trained, she came to jazz through a friendship with pianist Ziggy Skarbanik. Her professional start is well dated: in 1961, at seventeen, her song "Kshe'ani Ve'at" ("When I and You") placed third at the Israel Song Festival, performed by Nechama Hendel and Shimon Bar; Alon Oleartchik, later her Platina bandmate, separately recorded the same song as a vocalist, an earlier and distinct connection between the two.

From 1964 to 1969 she lived in New York, studying — her own official biography and a Calcalist retrospective disagree on exactly where, one saying the Mannes School of Music and the other the Manhattan School of Music — and working as a warm-up act for Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach and alongside vocalist Novella Nelson. She returned to Israel in 1969 and shifted her main instrument from piano toward organ and the Fender Rhodes electric piano, becoming — by repeated account in Israeli press — the first musician to bring the Fender Rhodes to Israel, which became her signature sound as she moved into arranging and session work across Israeli pop and rock.

She joined Roman Kunsman's band Platina in the mid-1970s on Hammond organ, Fender Rhodes and piano, becoming one of the only women instrumentalists of Israeli jazz's founding generation, alongside co-founder and drummer Aharon "Arale" Kaminsky, guitarist Yitzhak "Churchill" Klepter, keyboardist/reed player Nahum Perferkovich, and, in a later lineup, bassist Alon Oleartchik and bassist Viktor Fonarov. She was also a member of the jazz-rock band Cold Sweat and is connected, per her own official biography, to Shamayim, a band that regrouped some Platina members around singer Dani Litani after Platina's mid-1970s breakup.

Alongside performing she built a long career as an arranger and producer, working across decades with Arik Einstein, Shalom Hanoch, Chava Alberstein, Norit Galron, Yigal Bashan, Danny Litani, Meir Ariel, Corinne Allal, Yuval Banai, Mazy Cohen, Efrat Gush and singer Arleen Gale. Her only album as billed main artist, a setting of Leah Goldberg's love poems, came out in 2007 on Nana Disc. In 2005 she composed a joint theatrical and song program with poet Agi Mishol, When Alona Met Agi; in 2009 ACUM, Israel's composers' and authors' society, honored her with a tribute evening at Tel Aviv's Enav Cultural Center; and in 2018 she received the Arik Einstein Prize for veteran and established artists. A November 9, 2018 photograph of her, taken by Yaniv Grady, is captioned as documenting "the final performance of the Platina band" — a reunion show roughly six months before her death. In her last months she performed a show called I Will Speak With You, sharing its title with an Alberstein song she had composed, alongside vocalist Ronit Ophir.

She died on May 8, 2019, of cardiac arrest at 75, discovered in her car near Netanya while driving to a performance with Ophir on the eve of Israel's Independence Day. Posthumously, a piano scholarship at the Rimon School of Music was named for her, a memorial piano festival was held in November 2019 with proceeds funding that scholarship, and a memorial garden was dedicated in her name in Givatayim in May 2021 — two years after her death, a date some later accounts have mistakenly conflated with her actual death year.

Turel's signature as an instrumentalist was the Fender Rhodes sound she is repeatedly credited with introducing to Israel, which she carried from Platina's jazz-rock arrangements into decades of session and arranging work across Israeli pop. Her range as an arranger and producer — moving between Arik Einstein-era pop, Chava Alberstein's folk-adjacent songwriting, and Meir Ariel's more idiosyncratic material — reflects a career built more on serving other artists' material than on a fixed style of her own, which is likely why her sole billed album, a set of Leah Goldberg poems, came only late, in 2007.