This talk will examine the use of cross-dressing by sayeret matkal soldiers in Operation Spring of Youth – a 1973 commando raid in Beirut. The sayeret soldiers engaged in several forms of passing – gendered, cultural, and socioeconomic – in order to disguise their presence in the heart of the Lebanese capital. The aims of this talk are twofold: first, to explore the use of identity as part of a covert military operation, and especially the deployment of what I call weaponized queer practices. Secondly, I look at the subsequent narrativization of the raid in the Israeli media, which both lauded the military aspects of the operation while sexualizing the soldiers as women. I will argue that the weaponization of queer practices - drag performance in this case - and their use in the act of killing "de-queerifies" them and allows their inclusion, even foregrounding, in the public biographies of some of the soldiers - most notably Ehud Barak. This ex post facto "de-queerifying" of the operation turns it into a case of homonationalism without homosexuals: A co-optation of queer practices by a heteronormative national organization - the IDF - without the participation of any (openly) gay men or women.