Zechariah Baumel

Zechariah Baumel (; 17 November 1960 – 1982), also known as Zachary Baumel, was an American-Israeli soldier in the Israel Defense Forces. On the night of 10-11 June 1982, during the Battle of Sultan Yacoub in the 1982 Lebanon War, his unit was attacked and he and five other comrades were declared missing. One had been killed and was later found buried in Syria, and two were located alive in Syria and returned to Israel a few years later. But Baumel and two others (Feldman and Katz) remained unaccounted for. Until his death in 2009, Baumel's father Yona kept his son's case in the public eye, traveling around the world to uncover leads to verify the persistent rumors that his son was still alive, and criticizing the Israeli army for not pursuing the case vigilantly.

On 3 April 2019, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that the Russian army, in coordination with the Syrian military, had found Baumel's remains. The military operation was a result of a two-year cooperative effort between Israel and Russia to return bodies of missing Israeli soldiers buried in Syrian territory formerly controlled by ISIL; the operation was code-named Operation Bittersweet Song after a poem by Rachel Bluwstein. Baumel's remains were handed over to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in an official ceremony at the Russian defense ministry in Moscow on 3 April and interred the following day at the Mount Herzl military cemetery in Jerusalem. Feldman's remains were recovered in a Mossad Operation on May 11, 2025, while Katz's remains were recovered on August 18, 2026.

Early life and family Zechariah Baumel was born on November 17, 1960, in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Yona and Miriam Baumel. He was the youngest of three children. As a youth, he attended the Hebrew Institute of Boro Park.

Military career Baumel served as a tank commander in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). On the night of June 10–11, 1982, his tank was hit and the crew abandoned it. Israeli intelligence officers believed that the dog tag had been removed from Baumel's body by a Palestinian doctor who assisted in the burial of the fallen soldiers right after the battle. In 2003 Baumel fought against the IDF's decision to declare his son dead. The bodies of Baumel and 20 other people had been removed from the old Martyrs' Cemetery in the Yarmouk refugee camp south of Damascus earlier in April. Baumel was interred at the Mount Herzl military cemetery in Jerusalem on April 4, 2019, in the presence of Netanyahu and Israeli President Reuven Rivlin. Thousands attended the nighttime funeral.

In January 2020, Israel released two Syrian prisoners as a 'goodwill gesture' in relation to the transfer of Baumel's remains.