Funeral ceremony of the three slain Israeli teens (Ch2 screenshot)

In a hole in the ground, alongside a cave, north of Hebron. That’s where soldiers of the IDF’s Kfir and Maglan and civilian volunteer trackers units found the lifeless bodies of Eyal Yifrach, Gilad Shaar, and Naftali Frankel Monday afternoon.

“It’s wasn’t easy to find them,” one of the searchers told Israel’s Channel Two News.

“In the afternoon, one of the hikers who joined the search team saw a bush that looked odd,”  Benjamin Tropper, head of the Kfr Etzion Field School, who was among the civilian searchers told Channel 2 News.

“He moved it, and moved a pile of rocks and discovered the bodies lying beneath,” Tropper said. “He immediately alerted the IDF.”

“It’s an Arab area, with ancient ruins; it wasn’t easy to find,” he said, adding, “Our working assumption was that they were alive, and we searched in caves since you can live and survive in them.

“In the end, it turned out that they were not in a cave, but rather in an adjoining area,” Tropper concluded.

“We came at it with a different approach,” Hovav Landau told The Times of Israel (TOI).

Landau, who was a paratroop brigade recon unit officer, and his crew decided they were not “going to work according to the intelligence from the army and the Shin Bet,” according to the (TOI) report, but rather use their own “healthy logic,” in addition to the raw data. “…what would we do in the same situation?” Landau asked, rhetorically.

Watch a video of the site where the bodies were found below: