IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, a veteran of the elite Sayaret Matkal general staff reconnaissance unit, explained why 17 years after his death during the Second Lebanon War, pictures of Lt. Col. Emmanuel Moreno are still classified.
In the final episode of a Hot 8 documentary series about the elite unit, Halevi explained: “You were given a command to go to a zoo in enemy territory, and you need to cut the lion’s nails.
You have to get there, cross the border, get to the zoo, jump the zoo’s fence, get past the guards, and in the end, there’s a guy who wears a white coat who knows how to cut the lion’s nails… Emmanuel was like a lion tamer.”

Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who served with Moreno in Sayeret Matkal, in an interview with Hanoch Daum, spoke about why the officer’s picture is still classified to this day. “Since the enemy knows how to look back and say, ‘oh, I saw him at this and this place’ and then retroactively harm Israel’s security interests,” explained Bennett.
Moreno served as an officer in the elite Sayeret Matkal unit and for a time in the Israeli Security Agency. He was killed by a sniiper as his cover had been blown, at the end of the Second Lebanon war near Baalbek in eastern Lebanon. Even after his death in 2006, his photo is still forbidden from publication. Moreno was the first fallen soldier in the IDF whose photo is still classified following his death.