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Fake Massacres, Skewed Stats & Misleading Claims: The 25 Lies The Media Told You About The October 7 War

An Israeli military tank prepares to move atop a truck, after US President Donald Trump announced that Israel and Hamas agreed on the first phase of a Gaza ceasefire, on the Israeli side of the border with Gaza, Oct. 9, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad

The media has been rife with misinformation and libels about Israel’s conduct during the war that was triggered two years ago by the Hamas-led massacres in southern Israel on October 7, 2023.

HonestReporting has worked day and night to combat these anti-Israel lies as they spread through mainstream discourse, shaping a context-free narrative that promotes Israel as the sole aggressor and whitewashes Hamas’ terrorism.

While some lies quickly emerged in the mainstream media and then evaporated after a couple of days, others have persisted in one form or another.

Regardless of their longevity, each lie serves as a building block for the anti-Israel narrative that cast Israel’s defensive war as a crime against humanity and has sought to turn the Jewish State into a pariah within the international community.

The following are the top 25 lies promoted by the mainstream media since October 7:

Lie #1: Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

Truth: The claim that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza goes back almost as far as the beginning of Israel’s war against Hamas.

However, all these claims (whether by Amnesty International, scholar Omer Bartov, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, or the UN Commission of Inquiry) fail to meet the legal bar for determining genocide: That the only reasonable inference that could be drawn from Israel’s actions in Gaza is genocidal intent.

Those who claim that Israel is committing a genocide appear to pre-determine that conclusion and then attempt to twist the evidence and legal definition of genocide to find Israel guilty of this heinous crime.

Lie #2: Israel is responsible for famine/starvation in Gaza.

Truth: Throughout the war in Gaza, the media and aid organizations have forecast an imminent famine in the Gaza Strip, intent on finding Israel guilty of starving Palestinians in Gaza.

However, despite the imminent and alarmist nature of these forecasts, famine was never declared in any part of the Gaza Strip until August 2025, and there was no evidence of mass starvation in the enclave.

In an August 2025 report, the UN-backed body that monitors hunger declared famine in the Gaza Governorate, which includes Gaza City and its environs. However, analysts have noted several questionable aspects of the report’s methodology and analysis, which call into question its conclusions.

For a full takedown of the famine report, see here.

Lie #3: Gaza is one of the most densely populated areas on Earth. On October 7, it had a population of 9 million.

Truth: On October 7, 2023, the Gaza Strip had a population of 2 million people. At the size of 141 square miles, the Gaza Strip does not even crack the top 200 most populated areas on Earth.

Lie #4: After warning them to leave northern Gaza, Israel bombed Palestinians fleeing to the south.

Truth: In October 2023, some media outlets echoed Hamas’ claim that Israel was bombing Palestinians fleeing northern Gaza, publishing images that showed explosions amid convoys heading south.

Analysts noted that there was no evidence for an Israeli airstrike on the convoys and that the explosions could have been caused by IEDs planted by Hamas (in an effort to deter civilians from fleeing the combat zone) or faulty fuel containers that were being transported by those heading south.

Lie #5: Israel bombed Al-Ahli Hospital and killed 500 people.

Truth: On October 17, 2023, an explosion occurred at Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City. The media initially reported on Hamas’ claim that the hospital had been bombed and hundreds of people had been killed.

In reality, a misfired Islamic Jihad rocket hit the hospital’s parking lot, causing minimal damage to the hospital itself and tragically killing some Palestinians who had taken refuge in the area of the rocket’s impact.

Lie #6: Israel targets Palestinian journalists.

Truth: Since the beginning of the war, various media rights organizations, including the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and Reporters Without Borders (RSF), have claimed that Israel is targeting Palestinian journalists in Gaza.

It is true that, according to the CPJ, nearly 200 journalists and media workers have been killed during the Israel-Hamas war. However, an analysis of these names shows that roughly 40% of those killed had an affiliation with terror groups (including working for terror-run media organizations) and that several had participated in active combat against Israel.

With the embedding of Hamas forces in civilian areas, it is tragic but inevitable that civilians (including journalists) will be killed during military activities. This is not, however, evidence of intentional targeting of journalists.

Lie #7: 500 trucks are needed to meet Gaza’s pre-war levels of aid.

Truth: The claim by the United Nations and aid organizations that prior to October 7, 500 trucks entered Gaza daily, and that number is needed to meet the needs of Gaza’s civilian population, is misleading.

Before October 7, an average of 500 trucks entered Gaza daily, but the vast majority of them carried commercial goods, agricultural products, textiles, and construction materials. Only 100 trucks contained humanitarian aid, which is roughly the same number of trucks that have entered Gaza daily for most of the war.

Lie #8: Israel’s evidence that Hamas used Al-Shifa Hospital as a base is not compelling.

Truth: Contrary to media claims, the IDF has provided considerable evidence that Hamas used Al-Shifa Hospital for terror purposes.

This evidence includes testimonies from captured terrorists, intercepts of communications discussing Hamas’ use of Al-Shifa, the discovery of weapons and military gear in the hospital area, the unearthing of a terror tunnel beneath the hospital, and video footage showing hostages being brought to the hospital on October 7.

Lie #9: UNRWA is not a problematic aid organization and is one of the key humanitarian resources in the Gaza Strip.

Truth: Despite media and UN denials, there is incontrovertible evidence that the UN aid organization for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, plays a problematic role in the Gaza Strip.

1,200 UNRWA employees are members of either Hamas or Islamic Jihad, the organization’s schools teach antisemitism and promote anti-Israeli violence, and the globally-funded agency turns a blind eye to the placement of terror infrastructure and weaponry near its facilities. Even underneath UNRWA’s headquarters, there was a Hamas command center, of which the body claimed blissful ignorance.

Lie #10: Israel slaughtered Palestinian civilians waiting for aid during the “Flour Massacre.”

Truth: On February 29, 2024, scores of Palestinians died while waiting for aid to arrive in Gaza City. The media initially echoed Hamas’ claim that they had been killed in a targeted Israeli strike.

In reality, the vast majority of those who died were either crushed by the crowd during the chaos that erupted upon the arrival of the aid trucks, or were run over by the trucks themselves. Roughly 10 Palestinians were killed by Israeli gunfire when they rushed toward nearby IDF positions.

Lie #11: During the Israeli operation in Al-Shifa Hospital in March 2024, Israeli forces raped Palestinian women and brutally murdered other civilians.

Truth: This lie was perpetrated by a Gazan woman named Jamila al-Hessi during an interview with Al Jazeera Arabic’s top news presenter.

Less than 24 hours after the interview, al-Hessi’s claim was denounced by both a former director of Al Jazeera and Hamas itself. Al-Hessi admitted to spreading this lie to “arouse the nation’s fervor and brotherhood.”

Lie #12: Mass graves outside two Gazan hospitals are evidence of Israeli executions and desecration of bodies.

Truth: In late April 2024, mass graves were unearthed outside Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City and Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis.

Analysts noted that the graves had actually been dug before the arrival of Israeli forces, to bury those who had died in the hospitals but could not be interred in a formal cemetery. It is possible that newer bodies were added during the battles between Israeli forces and Hamas, but they were most likely buried by fellow Palestinians.

Despite claims by some that bodies had been found with their hands tied behind their backs, no independent evidence was ever provided for this claim.

In addition, while Israeli forces did dig up some graves while searching for Israeli hostages, the IDF re-interred any bodies that had been temporarily removed and did not destroy any identifying markers or desecrate the graves.

Lie #13: The Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health provides accurate casualty figures.

Truth: Since the beginning of the war in Gaza, the media and the United Nations have sought to convince people that the casualty figures provided by the Gaza Ministry of Health are accurate.

However, there are several indications that the Ministry of Health and its claim of 70% of casualties being women and children are unreliable.

Examples of this unreliability include unverifiable and anonymous “media reports” in the Ministry’s figures, the low proportion of non-combatant men among casualties, and discrepancies between the figures for one day and the next.

For an example of the last point, between December 2 and December 5, 2023, the number of women and children’s deaths surpassed the total number of deaths, an absurd statistical anomaly.

Lie #14: The ICJ ruled that there is “plausible” evidence for genocide in Gaza and that Israel must cease its operations in Rafah.

Truth: In December 2023, South Africa brought a case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) claiming that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. In January 2024, the ICJ issued its initial ruling on the matter. As clarified by Joan Donoghue, the Court’s former President, there was no finding of “plausible genocide” in Gaza, only that the Palestinians “had a plausible right to be protected from genocide.”

In May 2024, the ICJ issued a decision on Israeli military activity in southern Gaza, ruling that Israel would have to cease any military activity that “may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

This was not a blanket restriction on Israeli military activity, and Israel’s war against Hamas was allowed to continue in the enclave’s south.

Lie #15: Israel purposefully bombed a refugee camp in Rafah and caused a tent fire that killed tens of civilians.

Truth: In late May 2024, Israel targeted two senior Hamas commanders who were hiding near a civilian population but outside of a designated safe zone.

Based on Israeli and US reports, it is likely that shrapnel from the targeted strike hit something flammable (either munitions or a fuel container) that ignited and led to the lethal fire that swept through the tents. As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu commented, this was a “tragic accident.”

Lie #16: Israel massacred more than 200 Palestinians while rescuing four Israeli hostages in the Nuseirat refugee camp.

Truth: On June 8, 2024, Israeli security forces rescued four hostages (Noa Argamani, Almog Meir Jan, Shlomi Ziv, and Andrey Kozlov) from civilian homes where they were being held in the Nuseirat refugee camp. During the rescue operation, local Hamas forces attacked the rescue team and hostages as they attempted to escape, leading to a firefight in the middle of a civilian area.

There was no independent evidence to back Hamas’ claim that hundreds of Palestinians had been killed during the rescue operation or that the majority of those killed were civilians and not combatants who took part in the firefight.

Lie #17: Studies in The Lancet prove that many more Palestinians have been killed than is claimed by the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health.

Truth: In July 2024, The Lancet published a non-peer-reviewed correspondence that claimed that the number of dead in Gaza could be as high as 186,000. This faulty analysis reached this number by taking Hamas’ questionable casualty count (at the time, 37,000) and then multiplying it by five on the baseless assumption that there will be five times as many indirect deaths as those actively killed during the war.

The pushback to the piece was so great that one of the authors had to admit that it was not a scientifically-based analysis but was “purely illustrative” of what could be.

In January 2025, The Lancet published an article purporting to prove that the Gaza Ministry of Health’s casualty count was an under-reporting of reality.

However, this study came under scrutiny due to several flaws, including that its algorithm comparing social media-reported deaths to other casualty lists was faulty in 30% of cases, that the three casualty lists that were used by the study were intertwined (thus skewing the results), and that the authors disregarded analytic models that showed the estimated casualty figures to be lower.

Lie #18: Ismail Haniyeh was a moderating and pragmatic voice within Hamas that Israel silenced when it assassinated him in July 2024.

Truth: Contrary to how he was depicted in media reports at the time of his death, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was not a moderate.

Haniyeh was a cold-blooded terrorist who celebrated the October 7 attacks, called for “resistance” (i.e. terrorist) activities across Israel, and encouraged the death of Palestinian civilians for the greater cause of fighting Israel and ultimately destroying the Jewish state.

Lie #19: As shown in a New York Times essay, Israeli forces are purposefully targeting children.

Truth: The New York Times published a guest essay entitled “65 Doctors, Nurses, and Paramedics: What We Saw in Gaza.” Written by medical personnel who had served in Gaza, the piece claimed that they had seen evidence for Israel intentionally targeting children by shooting them in the head.

However, several military, medical, and forensics experts called into question certain aspects of the piece, including x-ray images that purported to show 5.56 caliber bullets lodged in the skulls of these children, but which did not appear to comport with the impact of a bullet of that size. For example, there were no exit wounds, skull fractures, or changes in the bullet’s shape.

In addition, there is no evidence that the bullets were fired from an Israeli gun rather than one operated by a Palestinian terrorist. To further cast doubt on the piece, one of its authors responded to the criticism by falsely claiming that Hamas does not use human shields but that Israel does.

Lie #20: Israel forces burned Kamal Adwan Hospital in December 2024.

Truth: During a counter-terror operation at Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia, which saw the arrest of 240 Hamas and Islamic Jihad members and the confiscation of a considerable amount of weaponry, a fire broke out in an empty part of the hospital and was quickly contained.

An initial IDF investigation determined that there was no connection between the fire and Israeli forces operating in the area.

Lie #21: Unless aid workers got to them immediately, 14,000 babies would die in the next 48 hours.

Truth: This absurd claim was put forward by the UN’s humanitarian chief, Tom Fletcher, in May 2025 during an interview with the BBC.

When pressed on it, Fletcher provided no evidence for his claim except for asserting that they have capable teams on the ground.

It was further discovered that Fletcher’s claim was a misrepresentation of an IPC report that projected that 14,000 Gazan children could experience acute malnutrition between April 2025 and March 2026.

Lie #22: Israel is planning on interning 600,000 Palestinians in camps in southern Gaza.

Truth: In July 2025, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz announced plans to build a “humanitarian city” in southern Gaza that would house 600,000 Palestinian civilians from the Al-Mawasi area who would have better access to humanitarian aid. To guarantee the civilian nature of this city, all people would be processed to ensure that they had no affiliation with Hamas. At no time did Katz use the word “camp” when discussing this plan.

According to Israeli reports at the time, Katz’s idea was a contingency plan for aiding civilians while fighting Hamas, but no work had been started on it.

Lie #23: Images of malnourished children are evidence for widespread starvation in Gaza.

Truth: In late July 2025, various media organizations published photos of emaciated and malnourished children, passing them off as evidence of widespread starvation in Gaza.

However, many of these children who were showcased suffered from pre-existing conditions, some of which (such as muscular dystrophy and cerebral palsy) have a heightened risk of malnutrition even in times of peace.

In some instances, photos of malnourished children included their well-nourished siblings standing in the background.

While the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is certainly tragic, images of malnourished children with pre-existing conditions are not evidence for widespread starvation.

Lie #24: Israel is preventing aid from entering Gaza.

Truth: Aside from the first two weeks of the war and a two-month blockade in 2025 that was an attempt to force Hamas to surrender, Israel has allowed for the continuous entry of aid into the Gaza Strip.

In fact, between the beginning of the war and the end of August 2025, over two million tons of aid were facilitated into the Gaza Strip. This is one of the largest humanitarian operations during a war in modern history.

Any delay in Gazans receiving this aid is due to the inherent difficulties in delivering it in combat zones, Hamas stealing aid, the UN refusing to pick up the aid, and the refusal of the UN to use Israeli-approved routes.

Lie #25: Israel is massacring Gazans as they seek aid from GHF sites.

Truth: When Israel restarted delivering aid to Gaza in May 2025, both it and the United States backed a new aid organization, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), that would deliver aid to Palestinian civilians while ensuring that Hamas could not get its hands on it.

While it has delivered millions of meals to Palestinians, it has been maligned by the media, the UN, and other aid agencies.

One of the chief libels about the GHF is that Israel routinely massacres those who are seeking aid. While the IDF does sometimes fire warning shots at those who stray from the designated paths near the aid centers, and sometimes have fired on those who get too close to their positions in unfortunate situations, many cases of reported massacres have proven to be unfounded or have been misreported instances of fire not related to the aid site.

The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

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Do you suffer from ‘Israel Derangement Syndrome’? This ad says there’s a cure

It opens like a two-minute infomercial pulled off a 1990s VHS tape. Soft lighting, Clinton-era fashion, a narrator whose voice has the reassuring cadence of a prescription drug ad. “Do you or someone you love suffer from Israel Derangement Syndrome?” he asks.

The two-minute ad has become one of the most-shared clips on Jewish and pro-Israel social media this week — posted Wednesday morning, it garnered 2.6 million views on X by Thursday afternoon.

“Israel Derangement Syndrome” is presented like a real illness, complete with a fictional treatment center, the Clarity Center, and patients who describe “recovering.” The “symptoms” are a list of ways people criticize Israel and its supporters — bringing up the conflict unprompted, refusing to see any other issue in the world as important, being unable to acknowledge nuance. The “cure,” according to the ad, is just reading more and checking your sources. It ends with a rapid-fire list of side effects: “reading past the headline, a sudden interest in Middle East history, and a constant urge to touch grass.”

The ad’s target is obvious: people who are sharply critical of Israel. The name isn’t new. It’s modeled on “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” a term used to dismiss criticism of the president as pathology.

Why it lands the way it does

Anita Atwell Seate, a professor of communication at the University of Maryland who studies how people’s group identities shape the way they respond to criticism, called what’s happening in the video a textbook case of tribalism.

Our group memberships, she said, shape our psychological processes, since they’re so tied to our sense of self. That pushes us to process information in self-protective ways: “When we feel good about our social groups,” she said, “we feel good about ourselves.”

There’s a well-documented pattern researchers call the “intergroup sensitivity effect,” where people are far more willing to accept criticism from members of their own group than from people they see as outsiders. When criticism comes from outside, the instinct isn’t to engage with it; it’s to discredit whoever’s delivering it. “They’re deranged, they don’t understand facts,” Atwell Seate said, describing that reflex, which is more or less the whole premise of the ad.

She doesn’t see the video as an attempt at persuasion at all. “It doesn’t do anything to help change hearts and minds of the out-group,” she said “But it certainly does something important for the in-group, which is reify their beliefs.” Videos like this, she says, are like a pep talk — aimed at people who already agree, meant to bring them closer together.

Where it came from

It’s not entirely clear who actually made the video. What’s clear is that it was shared — and got millions of views — from an X account called the Trencher Broadcasting Company, whose bio reads: “Building the future of AI media. Mostly satire, always entertaining.” It appears to have been made with AI video tools, part of a broader wave of AI-generated political videos that have flooded social media this year.

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TBC has posted this kind of thing before. Last week, the account shared an AI-fabricated video appearing to show Michigan Senate candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and YouTube personality Ms. Rachel discussing Israeli “colonizers” with children — a conversation that never actually happened.

Ms. Rachel had, notably, donated to El-Sayed’s campaign, and both have been outspoken advocates for children in Gaza, which may have inspired the video.

The “Israel Derangement Syndrome” video ends with a display of fake contact info, which comes with its own punchline.

Call the phone number and it’s like spinning a roulette wheel. The first time I called, the robotic voice wanted to sell me a home security system. The second time: a medical alert device. And the third time, I got this message: “If you received a call displaying this telephone number on your caller ID, it has been spoofed, meaning the caller ID has been faked by a scammer trying to hide their actual telephone number. We are sorry this is occurring. Unfortunately, we cannot stop this from happening.”

The ad also promotes a website IDSHelp.org, a domain that was registered on Tuesday and redirects to DerekhLearning.com, the homepage of an AI-powered app for studying Torah and Talmud. It’s a fitting coda for a video built around telling people to check their sources.

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Did this field trip to a mosque violate the First Amendment? A group of Palo Alto parents think so.

A group of Jewish, Hindu and Zoroastrian parents and students are suing a California school district, alleging that a high school program’s field trip to a mosque — and no other houses of worship — violated the First Amendment.

The suit, brought forth by Community Members for Religious Neutrality in Public Schools – San Francisco Bay Area, focuses on two trips that were part of a social justice program at Palo Alto High School.

According to the complaint filed in the Northern District of California on August 7: “The district failed to maintain religious neutrality, failed to ensure equal treatment among faiths, failed to protect student privacy and failed to vet, supervise, and monitor religiously divisive outside speakers during the school-sponsored event.”

Community Members for Religious Neutrality in Public Schools nor the Palo Alto Unified School District immediately responded to requests for comment.

The trip was part of Palo Alto High’s Social Justice Pathway, where according to a promotional video, students in 10th through 12th grades take English and history courses “through a social justice lens rather than the standard analytical lens, where facts and dates are memorized.” Palo Alto High started the program in 2014.

Field trips around the Bay Area are a hallmark of the program, including travels to Angel Island, where many Asian immigrants arrived in the U.S. in the early 20th century, and to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Students also have heard from a variety of speakers, including a Holocaust survivor and a Cambodian refugee.

The field trips to the mosque happened in 2022 and 2025. The plaintiffs include three Jewish Palo Alto High students, at least one of whom took part in the Social Justice Pathway.

The parent plaintiffs allege that the school had not fully informed them that their children were going to participate in “religiously inflected activity.”

According to the complaint, female students were encouraged to observe the customary dress code of wearing head coverings inside the mosque. They also observed a midday prayer, interacted with participants of a Quran memorization program, received Qurans as gifts and were “taught that Islam, in particular, promotes social justice,” the suit says.

“[The plaintiffs] belong to religious traditions that practice social justice,” the suit says. “The government’s endorsement of Islam in particular as a social justice faith denigrates their respective traditions and their identities as members of faith communities due equal treatment and appreciation within the District, State and country.”

The plaintiffs allege that the visit violated the First Amendment, since the public school was promoting a specific religion, and the 14th amendment, for elevating one religion over others.

A student at Palo Alto High who is part of the Social Justice Pathway disagreed, describing it as part of a broader religion unit.

“There was never a point on this trip where I felt in any way that the mosque or the school was trying to even suggest conversion,” he wrote in an Instagram comment on a local news post about the lawsuit. “The goal was obvious to us: Learn about an underrepresented religion present in our community.”

But plaintiffs also objected to the history of one of the speakers. Zahra Billoo, the executive director of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), who has faced allegations of antisemitism.

In 2019, Billoo was removed from the board of the Women’s March for past remarks she had made. She faced criticism for a 2021 Facebook post, where she warned against “polite zionists” like Hilllel and the Jewish federations, saying “they are not your friends.” A tweet of hers from October 7, 2023, following the Hamas-led terrorist attacks against Israel, also has faced scrutiny: “Pray for Gaza. We are witnessing decolonization,” she wrote.

In an emailed statement to the Forward, Billoo wrote, “Public schools have an obligation to remain neutral toward religion, but neutrality does not mean shielding students from learning about religion or religious communities.”

“Visiting a mosque, observing Muslims practice their faith, or learning about Islam is not the same as being compelled to practice Islam,” she wrote. “We are concerned that this lawsuit risks turning ordinary engagement with Islam and Muslims into something suspicious and could have a chilling effect on educators who want their students to learn about the diverse communities around them.”

But plaintiffs said allowing Billoo to speak with the students demonstrated negligence on the part of the school.

“Ms. Billoo was allowed unfettered access to students to advocate personal religious and political views without balancing perspective or adequate supervision.”

The school also allowed photos of the high schoolers to be taken at the event without parents’ permission, the suit says.

The post Did this field trip to a mosque violate the First Amendment? A group of Palo Alto parents think so. appeared first on The Forward.

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Remains of last Israeli soldier missing from First Lebanon War’s Sultan Yacoub battle found

(JTA) — The remains of Yehuda Katz, the last Israeli soldier still missing from the 1982 Battle of Sultan Yacoub during the First Lebanon War, have been recovered after 44 years, the Israeli military said Tuesday, bringing to a close one of the country’s longest-running missing soldier cases.

Katz, a 22-year-old tank gunner and yeshiva student who disappeared just 10 days before he was due to complete his military service, was one of three soldiers whose fate was unknown for decades after Israeli forces became trapped by Syrian troops in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley on June 11, 1982.

Twenty Israeli soldiers were killed and dozens more were wounded in the battle, with six initially listed as missing. Three were later returned or confirmed dead, leaving Katz, Zachary Baumel and Zvi Feldman as the only soldiers whose fate were unknown. The remains of Baumel and Feldman were recovered in separate operations in 2019 and 2025.

Katz’s remains were located during a special overnight operation carried out by the IDF in cooperation with Mossad and based on intelligence obtained in recent months. They were returned to Israel and military representatives informed Katz’s family of the discovery Tuesday morning.

For the soldiers who survived Sultan Yacoub, the news ended a wait that had followed them for much of their lives.

Avi Rath, who fought alongside Katz, said the unresolved fate of his comrade had stayed with him for decades. “The look on the family’s faces stays with you your entire life, a look that says, ‘You didn’t finish the job,’” Rath said in an interview on Tuesday with KAN public radio’s “Kalman Liberman” program. “Thank God, this closes a circle and resolves some of the uncertainty, but there is also great pain. It weighs on our conscience.”

Katz had studied in the Hesder program at Yeshivat Kerem B’Yavneh, combining Torah study with military service. According to the yeshiva, he slept barely four hours a night while immersed in his studies. He had planned to become a rabbi and teach at a yeshiva after completing his military service.

On the night before the battle, Katz gathered fellow soldiers around him and taught them Maimonides’ laws governing the conduct of Jewish soldiers in battle, the yeshiva said on its website. He then led them in singing Psalm 23, including the verse about walking through the valley of the shadow of death.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post Remains of last Israeli soldier missing from First Lebanon War’s Sultan Yacoub battle found appeared first on The Forward.

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