Israel Recovers Remains of Sgt. Yehuda Katz, Missing Since the First Lebanon War

JERUSALEM (VINnews) — Israel has recovered the remains of IDF Sgt. Yehuda Katz, who had been listed as missing in action for more than four decades following the 1982 Battle of Sultan Yakoub during the First Lebanon War.

The Katz family has been notified of the recovery, bringing an end to 44 years of uncertainty over the fate of the fallen soldier.

Katz, a student  at the Kerem B’Yavneh yeshiva, disappeared on June 11, 1982, during one of the war’s fiercest battles, alongside fellow soldiers Zachary Baumel and Zvi Feldman, who were also declared missing after the engagement.

Over the years, Israel carried out extensive efforts to locate the three soldiers. Baumel’s remains were recovered in 2019 with Russian assistance, while Feldman’s remains were returned to Israel in 2025 during a covert Mossad operation.

With the recovery of Katz’s remains, all three soldiers who went missing in the Battle of Sultan Yakoub have now been brought home.

For years, Katz’s family continued to seek answers about his fate. In a 2024 interview with Israel’s KAN Reshet Bet, his sister, Parachia Katz, recalled that Syrian forces had captured her brother’s tank during the battle.

She noted that the remains of the tank commander had eventually been buried in a Jewish cemetery in Damascus before later being returned to Israel.

“If Yehuda was in the same situation, why wasn’t he returned?” she asked at the time. “The Syrians had the tank. They returned the commander, so where did Yehuda go? Who has been looking for him all these years?”

Despite the passage of time, the family never completely abandoned hope that Yehuda might be alive.”I think about prisoners who have been released from Syrian prisons after 40 or 50 years,” Parachia said in the interview. “For years we’ve believed that such a possibility existed and that it wasn’t just a dream.”

The recovery of Katz’s remains closes one of Israel’s longest-running missing-in-action cases and marks the culmination of decades of intelligence gathering and recovery efforts aimed at bringing home soldiers who never returned from the battlefield.