An Israeli foreign ministry spokesperson has confirmed that Steven Sotloff, the American-Jewish journalist who was killed by the Islamic State terrorist group, was a dual American-Israeli citizen.
In Washington, a US National Security Council spokesperson said Wednesday an Islamic State video showing the beheading of the 31-year-old Sotloff in reprisal for US air strikes in Iraq is authentic.
"The U.S. Intelligence Community has analyzed the recently released video showing U.S. citizen Steven Sotloff and has reached the judgment that it is authentic," the statement said.
In the video, a masked figure also issued a threat against a third captive, who is British, a man the group named as David Haines, and warned governments to back off "this evil alliance of America against the Islamic State".
The Islamic State killer on the video seems to be the same British-accented man who appeared in an August 19 video showing the killing of another American journalist James Foley, and it showed a similar desert setting.
"I'm back, Obama, and I'm back because of your arrogant foreign policy towards the Islamic State, because of your insistence on continuing your bombings and ... on Mosul Dam, despite our serious warnings," the man said.
"So just as your missiles continue to strike our people, our knife will continue to strike the necks of your people."
Sotloff, a freelance journalist, was kidnapped in Syria in August 2013. His mother Shirley, a daughter of Holocaust survivors, appealed on August 27 in a videotaped message to Islamic State's self-proclaimed caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, for her son's release. Addressing the leader of the Islamic State group by name, Shirley Sotloff said in a video her son was "an innocent journalist" who shouldn't pay for U.S. government actions in the Middle East over which he has no control.
Sotloff was originally from Miami, Florida, where he day school at Temple Beth Am synagogue. His family still lives in Miami.
He left Miami to attend a boarding high school, Kimball Union Academy in Meriden, New Hampshire, where he coedited the student newspaper, graduating in 2002, according to a New York Times report. He attended University of Central Florida from 2002 to 2004, during which he wrote for the school paper, the Central Florida Future, the university said.
In 2008 he came to Israel as a student at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya to pursue his undergraduate degree. After graduation, Sotloff began his freelance journalism career, filing stories for both the Jerusalem Post and Jerusalem Report before moving on to outlets including Foreign Policy and TIME.
Sotloff at some point based himself in Yemen, having learned Arabic there, and traveled around the region with a Yemeni mobile number. His career took off during the Arab Spring, during which he published work for several publications.
According to the daily Miami Herald, after Steven disappeared, his family was connected with contacts in Washington, who were supposed to help the situation. The advice the family got was to keep his disappearance quiet, the better to negotiate a possible ransom, and to erase any trace of his Jewish identity from the web. They were told that ISIS “probably didn’t know or wasn’t sure that Sotloff was Jewish and knowing that he was Jewish would be like another Daniel Pearl situation, so let’s not give them that information,” a friend from home said.
That explains why Sotloff’s Facebook account disappeared, and why, when ISIS finally outed his capture, the New York Times deleted the reference to Sotloff’s Jewishness that was posted in its initial online report.