After 44 Years: Remains of Yehuda Katz, the Last Missing Soldier from Sultan Yacoub, Located

More than four decades after the Battle of Sultan Yacoub, IDF representatives informed the family of Yehuda Katz, of blessed memory, this morning (Tuesday) that the soldier’s remains have been located. Katz was the last soldier missing from the battle, after the bodies of Zecharia Baumel and Zvi Feldman were returned to Israel in recent years.

The discovery of the remains may bring to a close a chapter that has lasted more than four decades, centered on intelligence and operational efforts to locate the three soldiers missing from the battle. In 2019, the body of Zecharia Baumel, of blessed memory, was returned to Israel with Russian assistance, and in 2025, the body of Zvi Feldman, of blessed memory, was returned in a covert Mossad operation.

Katz, Baumel, and Feldman were declared missing following the Battle of Sultan Yacoub, which took place on June 11, 1982, near a road junction south of the village of Sultan Yacoub in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. For decades, their families worked to learn what had happened to them, alongside efforts by Israel’s security establishment to locate them and bring them home to Israel.

In 2004, the then-chief military rabbi, Rabbi Yisrael Weiss, ruled that the three soldiers should be declared “fallen soldiers whose burial place is unknown.” Their family members opposed the decision and petitioned against it; following their struggle, the declaration was rescinded.