The Embassy of Israel announced on Twitter that Steven Sotloff, whose murder was announced by the Islamic State on Tuesday, was a dual citizen of the United States and Israel. 
 
 The Times of Israel then reported that the American journalist Sotloff, 31, was Jewish, held an Israeli passport and had spent a lot of time in the country. He was from Miami, but moved to Israel in 2008 to complete an undergraduate degree. 
 
 "The Times of Israel held this story for several weeks out of fear of endangering Sotloff’s life by writing about his Jewish and Israeli connections," the website said, before detailing his deep interest in and extensive coverage of the turmoil in the Middle East as a journalist for U.S. and Israeli publications. It was this reporting that led Sotloff to Syria one year ago. 
 
 BREAKING Cleared for pub.: Steven Satloff, kidnaped & murdered by #ISIS, was #Israel citizen. Thoughts are with his family at this time. — Embassy of Israel (@IsraelinUK) September 3, 2014 
 
 A video released by the Islamic State showed his brutal beheading, and contained a message from the knife-wielding killer to America: "I'm back, Obama, and I'm back because of your arrogant foreign policy against the Islamic State." 
 
 Two weeks ago, James Foley, another American journalist, died in a similar manner. Both men were wearing orange jumpsuits and delivered a propaganda message to the U.S. government, apparently written by their captors. Both videos appeared on YouTube. 
 
 Cleared for publication: Steven Satloff was #Israel citizen RIP — Paul Hirschson (@paulhirschson) September 3, 2014 
 
 The U.S. Government confirmed on Wednesday the authenticity of the video. 
 
 "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," it said in a statement. 
 
 Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments. ||||| ISIS appears to have cruelly executed American journalist Steven Sotloff just one week after his mother pleaded with the group's leader to "be merciful" and spare her son. 
 
 Shirley Sotloff's heartbreaking bid for her son's life was ignored and video was released today indicating he was the second American journalist to be beheaded by the Islamic militant group, ostensibly in retribution for U.S. planes bombing ISIS fighters in Iraq. 
 
 Sotloff's parents have declined any media interviews and have been enduring an agonizing wait after James Foley was executed last month and Sotloff was shown on his knees, wearing an orange jumpsuit and threatened with execution. Their only public words were Shirley Sotloff's video message to ISIS' caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi saying, "I ask you justice be merciful and not [to] punish my son for matters he has no control over. I ask you to use your authority to spare his life.” 
 
 Video Appears to Show ISIS Execution of Second American Steven Sotloff 
 
 Mother of American Hostage Pleads With ISIS ‘Caliph’ for Mercy 
 
 Could Money Have Saved James Foley? ISIS 'Wasn’t Serious' About Demands, Officials Say 
 
 At the time of his capture, Sotloff, 31, had been covering the Middle East for years as a freelance reporter, including stints in Yemen and Egypt. He wrote for Time Magazine, the Christian Science Monitor, the Daily Caller, Foreign Policy, and most recently for World Affairs Journal. 
 
 The reporter studied journalism at the University of Central Florida, according to the Orlando Sentinel. His articles online show heartfelt reporting about the brutality of the Syrian war. 
 
 His parents live in Miami, and Sotloff's last Tweet, from August 2013, was about the Miami Heat NBA team. 
 
 His Twitter feed, which was his major online presence beyond his reported stories, showed a mix of humor and seriousness about his reporting. 
 
 Is it bad that I want to focus on #syria, but all I can think of is a #HEATFinals repeat? — Steven Sotloff (@stevensotloff) June 12, 2013 
 
 Friends of Sotloff and his family had started a White House petition urging the government to do all it can to rescue the freelance reporter. 
 
 "Steven Sotloff is an American citizen and reporter with Time magazine who is believed to have gone missing in August of 2013," the petition read. "Today, on August 19, 2014 it was revealed that Steven is a captive of the Islamist terrorist organization ISIS." 
 
 "We, the undersigned call upon you, President Obama, to take immediate action to save Steven's life by any means necessary,” it said. 
 
 Matthew Van Dyke, a documentary filmmaker, self-described “revolutionary” and friend of Sotloff's, told ABC News that the two last saw each other in Washington, D.C., just a few weeks before Sotloff's disappearance. Van Dyke has reported from the Middle East, and joined the fighting during the Libyan revolution, and was held as a prisoner of war. 
 
 "We were talking about his upcoming trip to Syria," Van Dyke said. "I feel horrible for what he's going through, I can't really imagine. I mean I thought I had a tough time in Libya but to be held by ISIS for this long, Steven's been there for a year now and who knows what kind of conditions they're in. It's absolutely horrifying. I can't imagine it." 
 
 World Affairs, the journal that had most recently employed Sotloff, described him as "an honest and thoughtful journalist who strives to understand the story from local perspectives and report his findings straightforwardly. He is certainly courageous." ||||| Steven Sotloff, the journalist beheaded by the Islamic State, was a dual Israel-US citizen and had even studied in Israel, it emerged Wednesday, the day after a video of his brutal murder was aired online. 
 
 The White House says it has determined that the video showing his killing is authentic, after Islamic State extremists released the video showing Sotloff's beheading on Tuesday. It comes two weeks after the militants released a video showing the killing of James Foley, another American journalist. 
 
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 Sotloff made aliyah and studied at the IDC some 10 years ago. After his capture in Syria, it seems any connection to Israel was deleted from his online presence in a bid to prevent the information from reaching his captors. 
 
 National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden announced the US intelligence community's assessment of the video in a statement Wednesday. 
 
 Colleagues and acquaintances remembered Sotloff as a generous man fascinated by journalism and the changes gripping the Middle East, and determined to tell stories from the perspective of average people, not army movements on the battlefield. 
 
 Sotloff in Syria (Photo: Gettyimages) 
 
 A friend who was with Sotloff in captivity told Ynet's sister-print publication Yedioth Aharonoth that Sotloff was Jewish - a fact he hid from his captors - and even managed to observe the Yom Kippur fast while in Islamic State captivity. 
 
 "He told them he was sick and didn’t want to eat, even though we were served eggs that day," the friend said. "He used to pray secretly in the direction of Jerusalem. He would see in which direction (his Muslim captors) were praying and then adjust the angle." 
 
 Steven Sotloff (Photo: EPA) 
 
 Others recalled his professionalism: "He struck me as a very, very decent guy ... he wasn't chasing headlines, he wasn't hyping a pitch," said James Denton, publisher and editor of the Washington-based journal World Affairs, one of several publications that hired him for freelance work. Others included TIME and Foreign Policy. 
 
 "He wanted to get the story, he wanted to peel away the layers," said Denton, who met Sotloff over coffee in Washington in May 2013, and published two of his dispatches from Cairo the following July. 
 
 'An honorable man' 
 
 Sotloff, a 31-year-old Miami-area native who freelanced for Time and Foreign Policy magazines, vanished in Syria in August 2013 and was not seen again until he appeared in a video released last month that showed Foley's beheading. 
 
 Dressed in an orange jumpsuit against an arid Syrian landscape, Sotloff was threatened in that video with death unless the US stopped airstrikes on the Islamic State. 
 
 At Sotloff's parents' home in Pinecrest, Florida., two police vehicles blocked the driveway Tuesday, and officers advised journalists to stay away. Friends of the family could be seen coming and going. 
 
 A spokesman for the family, Barak Barfi, said in a brief statement that the family “knows of this horrific tragedy and is grieving privately,” 
 
 "Everyone's been concerned. Everyone is grieving," neighbor Pepe Cazas said. "It's terrible. I've been praying for him." 
 
 Last week, Sotloff's mother, Shirley Sotloff, pleaded with his captors for mercy, saying in a video that her son was "an innocent journalist" and "an honorable man" who "has always tried to help the weak." 
 
 Sotloff grew up in the Miami area, and graduated from Kimball Union Academy, a prep school in New Hampshire. He was also a student at Temple Beth Am Day School in Florida. 
 
 As a student at Kimball, Sotloff "developed a passion for reporting and writing, a gift that he shared with people around the world, and this unthinkable act of terror has taken him from us far too soon," New Hampshire Gov. Maggie Hassan said in a statement. 
 
 Sotloff then attended the University of Central Florida, which said he majored in journalism from 2002 to 2004, but apparently left without graduating. 
 
 Just how Sotloff made his way from Florida to Middle East hotspots is not clear. He published articles from Syria, Egypt and Libya in a variety of publications. Several focus on the plight of ordinary people in war-torn places. 
 
 One individual familiar with the case said the family's theory had been that Sotloff was grabbed by a criminal gang, and later transferred or "sold" to Islamic State. This could not be confirmed by his family, which declined interview requests. 
 
 Preparing for the trip to Syria, Sotloff reportedly asked a fellow reporter in June 2013: "What type of lawlessness in Aleppo? Should I keep my eyes open for anything regarding safety?" 
 
 "Can you meet with ISI," he asked, using an earlier acronym for Islamic State. "And the quality of life? Is there still plenty of food available? Gas?" 
 
 In a statement, Foreign Policy magazine called him a "brave and talented journalist" whose reporting "showed a deep concern for the civilians caught in the middle of a brutal war." 
 
 Time editor Nancy Gibbs said Sotloff "gave his life so readers would have access to information from some of the most dangerous places in the world." ||||| Pinecrest journalist Steve Sotloff lost his life to Muslim militants who kidnapped him and proudly posted his decapitation on the Internet. But he kept a secret from them to the very end: He was Jewish, and an Israeli citizen. 
 
 Sotloff, who had managed to conceal his Jewish identity for years as he reported from potentially hostile spots around the Middle East, kept up his remarkable deception even during the year he was held after being kidnapped by the murderous Islamic State militia. 
 
 He prayed in the direction of Jerusalem and faked stomach aches so he could fast on Jewish holy days. Sotloff’s friends, who began talking about his trickery for the first time after the Islamic State posted a video of his mutilated body Tuesday, say they are certain that if the jihadist group had ever caught on, it would have boasted to its followers that it was killing a Jew. 
 
 Tuesday’s revelations came as reaction to Sotloff’s death — Islamic State’s second public murder of an American hostage in two weeks — continued to reverberate around the world, nowhere louder than the White House. 
 
 “Those who make the mistake of harming Americans will learn that we will not forget, and that our reach is long and that justice will be served,” said President Barack Obama at a news conference during a state visit to Estonia. Vice President Joe Biden, during an appearance in Maine, warned that the U.S. government will pursue the killers to “the gates of hell.” 
 
 At the Sotloff family home, the reaction was more somber. The family announced a memorial service, open to the public, at 1 p.m. Friday at Temple Beth Am, 5950 SW 88th St. 
 
 Sotloff’s abduction has been shrouded in secrecy from the beginning. His family and the media outlets he worked for, including Time and Foreign Affairs magazines, didn’t reveal his kidnapping for fear of complicating efforts to win his release. 
 
 They also tried to scrub the public record of anything that suggested Sotloff was Jewish or Israeli. The Israeli government suppressed all archives that showed his citizenship. Even a brief biography of his mother, Shirley, which mentioned her parents were Holocaust survivors, was erased from the website of the Temple Beth Am Day School, where she taught. 
 
 (Though, as one of Sotloff’s friends wistfully noted, “on the Internet, nothing is ever really deleted.” The New York Times stumbled onto a cached copy of the biography and published a story on its website identifying Sotloff as the grandchild of Holocaust survivors before quickly expunging the reference. “We did not want to publish anything that could jeopardize — or be perceived as jeopardizing — his safety,” Times foreign editor Joe Kahn told the Miami Herald on Wednesday.) 
 
 Even when the Islamic State announced Sotloff’s captivity to the world last month in an Internet video — along with a blunt threat to kill him if U.S. foreign policy didn’t change — relatively few details emerged. Many news organizations, including the Miami Herald, learned that Sotloff was Jewish but held the fact back from their stories. 
 
 On Wednesday, details began to emerge for the first time. Among the first was a tweet from an Israeli foreign ministry official that announced: “Cleared for publication: Steven Sotloff was Israel citizen RIP.” 
 
 Sotloff grew up in Miami and attended the same school where his mother taught pre-school, but for the past decade his heart was in Israel after he had what friends called “a Jewish roots experience.” 
 
 Like hundreds of thousands of young Jews, he took an all-expenses-paid educational trip to Israel sponsored by the Taglit-Birthright Israel foundation. Sometime afterward, he returned home to tell his parents he was dropping out of the University of Central Florida after three years pursuing a journalism degree and moving to a Tel Aviv suburb to major in government studies at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, a private college. 
 
 “They weren’t too thrilled about the idea of this,” said the Sotloff family’s rabbi, Terry Bookman. “But they didn’t get in his way.” 
 
 After graduating in 2008, Sotloff jumped into freelance journalism. He occasionally reported from Europe, including a story on Vienna’s ancient but beleaguered Jewish colony. But more often he was in the front lines of the Middle East, writing about the victims of the region’s endless wars. 
 
 Sotloff wanted “to give a voice to people that didn’t have a voice,” said his Interdisciplinary Center classmate Daniel Isaacsohn, 34, now a corporate personnel specialist in Boston . Agreed his elementary school playmate Danielle Berrin, now a Los Angeles writer: “As a journalist, he was drawn to places of tumult and conflict.” 
 
 But those places, including Libya and Syria, are not friendly to Jews or Israelis, so Sotloff became adept at fudging his background. “Apparently he had all these hilariously great cover stories for his name,” Berrin said. Other friends said Sotloff told people he was Chechen and that he was a secular Muslim. 
 
 The oddball cover stories reminded Berrin very much of the mischievous little boy she went to school with. “I remember him as this goofy, really playful, fun-loving kid,” she said. “He went off to boarding school [in New Hampshire], and we were out of touch for a long time. And then, out of the blue, I got this email from him. And I was really startled that he had grown into this serious, indefatigable and fearless journalist.” 
 
 Some of Sotloff’s friends, however, thought a little bit of fear might be good for him. On Sotloff’s visits home to Pinecrest, Rabbi Bookman cautioned him that Syria, torn by a tri-cornered civil war in which journalists are mostly considered targets rather than neutral observers, was too dangerous. 
 
 “There was no real stopping him,” Bookman said. “There was no talking him out of it. He knew how to be careful. He had been there before.” 
 
 And, Bookman added, he understood Sotloff’s passion. “He had a big humanist streak,” the rabbi recalled. “He was always curious about the Arab world; he became an Islamophile. He believed in the Arab spring. [And] his writing was exquisite.” 
 
 Bookman’s warning about Syria, however, was deadly right. Sotloff was abducted shortly after he and his driver crossed the border from Turkey. And, except for a single phone call to his parents last December, he was never heard from again. 
 
 But another foreign hostage who for a time was imprisoned with Sotloff but later released told his family that their son successfully deceived his captors about his Jewishness and even privately taunted them by watching them saying Muslim prayers in the direction of Mecca, then adjusting the angle so he could pray toward Jerusalem. 
 
 Mrs. Sotloff, certain it no longer mattered, videotaped a plea to the Islamic Nation last week in which she might have given away her son’s Jewish identity. “I ask you to use your authority to spare his life,” she said in the video, “and to follow the example set by the Prophet Mohammed, who protected people of the book.” 
 
 “People of the book” is a reference to a phrase in the Quran and sometimes an Islamic codeword for Jews. But it can also refer to Christians and some believers in some other pre-Islamic religions. 
 
 In any event, Sotloff’s religion probably had nothing to do with his fate. “They’re killing Christians,” Bookman said. “They’re killing Zoroastrians. They’re killing Shia. Putting a Jew into the hopper, I don't know if it matters.” 
 
 An earlier version of this story q uoted Steven Sotloff’s childhood friend, Danielle Berrin, as saying that he concealed his Jewish identity while traveling in hostile territory in the Middle East by claiming to be Chechen and a secular Muslim with little formal religious training. Berrin, however, says she was only repeating what she had read in other accounts. The Herald has nonetheless verified the account of Sotloff's cover stories with other friends. 
 
 Steven Sotloff service 
 
 There will be a memorial service for Steven Sotloff on Friday at 1 p.m. at Temple Beth Am, 5950 SW 88th St. The service will be open to the public.
– The US has confirmed the authenticity of an ISIS video featuring journalist Steven Sotloff's beheading, with President Obama asserting that the recent executions only "stiffen our resolve" against the militant group. After intelligence officials analyzed the clip, Obama discussed it today in Estonia, the New York Times reports. "Whatever these murderers think they will achieve by killing innocent Americans like Steven, they have already failed," he said. "They failed because, like people around the world, Americans are repulsed by their barbarism. We will not be intimidated," he added, per Politico. Calling Sotloff "courageous," Obama said that "his killers try to claim that they defend the oppressed, but it was Steven who traveled across the Middle East risking his life to tell the story of Muslim men and women demanding justice and dignity." He added, "We will not forget," noting that "our reach is long" and "justice will be served." Meanwhile: A tweet from the Embassy of Israel notes that Sotloff, an American, was also an Israeli citizen, Mashable reports. He received his undergraduate degree from an Israeli university, the Times of Israel notes. Sotloff wrote for publications ranging from Time magazine to the Daily Caller to Foreign Policy, ABC News notes. His most recent employer, World Affairs Journal, calls him "an honest and thoughtful journalist who strives to understand the story from local perspectives and report his findings straightforwardly." White House press secretary Josh Earnest apparently learned of the beheading during a press briefing, during which the news broke, Mediaite reports. When a journalist asked about the matter, Earnest said, "I've not seen those reports today. That may have just happened in the last few minutes as I've been standing up here."