With her husband Yosef by her side, but bereft of her soldier-son and with no knowledge of his fate for nearly 29 years, Sarah Katz of Ramat Gan died this week at the age of 87.

Her son Yehuda is one of the three still-missing soldiers from the Battle of Sultan Yaaqub in the 1982 Peace for Galilee War. A top student in Yeshivat Kerem B’Yavneh, Yehuda enlisted in the army through the Hesder arrangement and was an artillery corps gunner. Two other soldiers – Zechariah (Zack) Baumel from Yeshivat Har Etzion, and Tzvi Feldman, who had just been accepted to Hebrew University – have similarly been missing since Sultan Yaaqub.

The battle took place on June 11, 1982, several hours before a ceasefire went into effect and a few days before Katz was to have completed his army service. Ten soldiers were killed and 30 were wounded; two of the captured soldiers and another dead soldier were returned in two prisoner-exchanges in later years.

Sarah Katz’s grandson Shai Kfir of Beit El, a nephew of Yehuda Katz, told Arutz-7 of his grandmother’s hard life: “It didn’t just begin with this very sad period since 1982. She survived concentration camps in the Holocaust, and then merited to arrive in the Holy Land to take part in the rebuilding of the land with Jewish homes. But here too she went through many difficult times, including losing a brother during the War of Independence. But she never had complaints against G-d or any person; the most important thing we learned from her was her simple and complete faith.”

The Katz family waged a struggle against the IDF when it wanted to declare the three missing fighters as “fallen IDF soldiers whose burial place is unknown.” The family refused, however, to give up the search for their son’s fate, and as a result, the army redoubled its efforts to do so – but to no avail. A photograph of a Syrian tank paraded through Damascus after the war with what appear to be live or dead IDF soldiers has been a major part of the families’ campaign to determine their fates.

Just last month, it was reported by the Jewish Chronicle in London that the British government refuses to publish documents in its possession that might shed light on the issue – for fear of harming its relations with Syria. According to the report, on the day the battle took place, the British Ambassador in Syria sent a report to London that likely included testimony regarding the capture of the three soldiers.