Bereaved families seek answers over missing tank crew

Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon has taken an interest in resolving a 42-year-old mystery as to the whereabouts of the remains of four IDF soldiers, who died in the 1973 Yom Kippur War and may have been buried in Jerusalem without their families’ knowledge.

Ya’alon, who fought in the war, last week asked to see details of a report by the IDF’s Missing Persons Unit that concluded that the Egyptians had returned the remains of a tank crew killed on the first day of the war, October 6, 1973, the Hebrew-language Haaretz news site reported on Monday.

For over four decades, IDF soldiers Meiron Altager, Yaakov Keller, Haim Mutzafi and Dan Gilat were believed to have fallen in action along the Suez Canal. The whereabouts of their remains were officially unknown.

But last year, a report from the missing person’s unit concluded there was a high probability that their bodies were returned to Israel in July 1977 and interred in a mass grave for unidentified soldiers at the Mount Herzl military cemetery in Jerusalem.

Because none of the bodies were identified, their families were not informed and continued to believe their loved ones were lost somewhere in the Sinai Desert, where some of the bitterest fighting of the three-week conflict took place.

Now the families are pushing to have the status of their loved ones changed to that of fallen soldiers buried in Israel, giving them a measure of emotional closure.

Retired IDF general Yaakov Amidror, who is responsible for dealing with fallen soldiers from the Egyptian front during the 1973 war, remained wary of reaching such conclusions. Amidror maintains that since the IDF didn’t positively identify the bodies at the time, there is no way of establishing whether they are indeed the missing tank crew. The families, on the other hand, argue that, at the time, advanced methods of identification, such as DNA testing, where not available to the IDF, the report said.

Knesset member Amir Peretz (Zionist Union), another veteran of the fighting in the Sinai in 1973, has asked that the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee debate the issue.

A modern DNA test would involve exhuming the bodies, a controversial issue in Israel, as the practice is considered a desecration of the grave, which is forbidden under Jewish religious laws.

According to the Haartez report, from 1974 until 1987 the Egyptians returned some 200 coffins containing the remains of 147 soldiers. Those who were not positively identified were buried in the communal grave in Mount Herzl. Currently, there are 18 IDF soldiers who are considered to have fallen during the Yom Kippur War but whose remains are still missing.