Yoram Louvish

Yoram Louvish was the head of the archaeology department at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. As most Israeli did, he had served in the Israeli Defense Forces and had risen to the rank of major.

Louvish led a long term project near Temple Mount which included the Jewish-American Eric Katz. He quietly invited Katz and the grad student Orly Binur along with Israeli-Arab archeologist Munir al-Nuwayhi to work on an irregular if not illegal dig under the Temple Mount. A hidden tunnel had been dug from a passageway to the Western Wall that went deep into the lower levels of the Mount. At the end of the tunnel Katz and Binur noticed something strange which turned out to be old stonework. Al-Nuwayhi identified the style as dating from before the Babylonian conquest making it from the period of the First Temple.