Yamina head Naftali Bennett transferred a document to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu allegedly detailing the burial locations of the two remaining IDF soldiers missing from the battle of Sultan Yacoub, Walla reported on Thursday, sourcing two individuals familiar with the matter.
Bennett’s office did not respond to a request for comment by The Jerusalem Post.
The battle, which took place during the Lebanon War in June 1982, infamously left many dead and three missing at the time: Yehuda Katz, Zachary Baumel and Zvi Feldman.
The battle took place in Lebanon, near the Syrian border.
Baumel’s body was recovered via an undercover operation in 2019, 37 years after its disappearance. Feldman and Katz were members of Baumel’s military unit.
The national security division at the Prime Minister’s Office did not deny that the document was transferred to National Security Adviser Meir Ben-Shabbat, Walla noted.
The report added that, according to a security official, the information presented in the document is already well-known in the intelligence community.
Walla obtained a copy of the original document from an unidentified non-Israeli source. The document is dated at least 20 years.
It is a memorandum, written with what the source is convinced is Yasser Arafat’s handwriting. The document contains the official stamp of the Palestinian Authority president’s office, Walla’s report noted.
The report noted that the document describes the location of three burial sites in a Damascus graveyard where PLO personnel were buried from 1980.
In February, the Russian military began excavation projects in a Syrian cemetery at the Yarmouk Refugee Camp in Damascus in search of the two missing bodies, specifically for DNA samples.
Baumel’s remains were identified by his DNA.
Tobias Siegal contributed to this report.