Yehuda Katz
Bodies of soldiers who died in 1982 brought home
08/19/2026 – 12:20 a.mReading time: 2 minutes
Jehuda Katz fell in the battle of Sultan Jakub. That was in 1982. Now the soldier’s body was returned to Israel.
During a joint operation with the foreign intelligence service Mossad, the Israeli army recovered the remains of a man who had been imprisoned for 44 years Lebanon missing Israeli soldiers brought home. The armed forces said on Tuesday that they had been searching for decades for the soldier Jehuda Katz, who died in the first Lebanon war. The recovery of his body was now carried out on the basis of “precise information”. The army did not provide any information about where the body was found.
Katz and two other Israeli soldiers had been missing since the Battle of Sultan Jakub in June 1982. In the battle, the Israeli and Syrian armies faced each other in the eastern Lebanese Bekaa Valley near the Syrian border. In 2019, the body of the missing Zachariah Baumel was brought home and buried. In May 2025 they were in Syria The remains of Zvi Feldman were found. The search for Katz continued until the end.
Netanyahu claims success for himself
His remains have now been sent to Israel transferred and, according to the army, identified in an institute for the identification of fallen soldiers under the supervision of the military rabbinate.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that he had “authorized numerous covert operations over many years to locate Sultan Jakub’s missing soldiers.” He promised the families of the three soldiers that he would “bring them home.”
President Isaac Herzog said he hung a photo of Katz in his office as a “daily reminder of our sacred duty to bring our sons home and leave no one behind.” The “open, bleeding wound” caused by the battle of Sultan Jakub could now heal.
