Hebron – Israeli Military Searching For 3 Yeshiva Students Reported Missing

Hebron – Israel’s military says its soldiers are searching the West Bank after three Israeli teenagers were reported missing.

The military issued the statement Friday. It did not offer any other details. A statement for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office blamed Palestinians for the teen’s disappearance without elaborating.

Palestinian authorities could not be immediately reached for comment.

Brig. Gen. Motti Almoz said that the military and intelligence forces were searching for the missing Israelis.

“The main mission is to ensure their return,” he said. He refused to offer any other details, saying it would compromise the operation.

A gag order had been imposed over the incident by Israel’s Shin Bet intelligence agency Friday morning.

Netanyahu has convened an emergency security cabinet session with his top defense chiefs at the Kirya Defense Ministry compound in Tel Aviv, Channel 2 reported.

While they do strongly fear the boys were kidnapped, security forces have not yet been able to rule out all other possibilities police said.

Police were in touch with the families and said that they have no reason to believe that the teenagers decided to go missing on their own, or run away from home or their yeshiva.

A spokesman for the Talmon settlement in the Binyamin Region of the West Bank, said that one of the missing teens was 16 years old and was with a friend when he disappeared. The teen from Talmon was making his normal trek home for Shabbat from his high-school yeshiva, as he does every week.

He called his father around 7 p.m. and said he had already left school. Initially his father did not worry, because the teen often took his time coming home and sometimes did not arrive until late at night.

But after midnight, the father called his son’s phone. When he could not reach him by 2 a.m. he called the police. Until morning, the father held out hope, that his son had gone to a friend’s home in the settlement to sleep.

In the morning he checked with all his son’s friends. A larger check was made of the settlement, but the teen was no where to be found.

Palestinian media on Friday reported that a large number of Israeli forces had been deployed to the Hebron vicinity in search of the boys who went missing earlier in the morning.

Palestinian news agency Ma’an cited sources in the vicinity as saying Israeli forces had raided various home in the city of Dura, located southwest of Hebron, in search of the missing boys.