The yeshiva student who was murdered last week had an "openness" to peace in his "soul", a rabbi who co-founded the interfaith group he attended has said.

Yeshiva student and IDF soldier Dvir Sorek was a member of Roots, which brings together Israeli Jews and Palestinians aged between 18 to 25 for meetings every two weeks.

He went missing last Wednesday morning and was found stabbed to death near his yeshiva.

Roots co-founder Rabbi Shaul Judelman said the 19-year-old’s death had hit the group hard but said it was no more painful than “all the other deaths that have happened because of this conflict.”

Rabbi Judelman said Mr Sorek first came to the group to attend an iftar - the meal Muslims eat after sundown while fasting for Ramadan - with other boys from his yeshiva.

“You could see openness in his eyes,” he said.

“One of the things about the conflict is that it forces you to keep your head down but some souls have the call to look up and Dvir wanted to do that.”

Rabbi Judelman added: “We feel like a family. This is what it means to do peace on the front line of the conflict.

“We live together side by side and he was doing what he could to look up and look outside of where he lived.

"He had hopes and an understanding about what it means to take responsibility and get to know who you live along side. He recognised that it is important to understand what their lives are like, their realities.”

Mr Sorek was from the Ofra settlement, and was studying at a religious seminary in Migdal Oz.

Loss is something the Roots group is familiar with - one of the Palestinian members, Ahmad Manasra, was killed in March by the IDF at a checkpoint.

A group of Palestinians from the group wrote about this in a letter to Mr Sorek’s family, in which they expressed “condolences to his family and to our friends in the yeshiva.

“For us as a group, we condemn this kind of vicious violence that targets us all for our place of residence, religion, identity, or citizenship. We hope that this incident will be the last tragedy on either side.

“Everyone was shocked by what happened, Palestinians and Israelis cried together to lose our new friend."

"Anyone who reads those words will know they came from the heart,” Rabbi Judelman said of the letter.

“When you have lived here long enough you have lost enough people. Everyone has lost someone and it strengthens the bond we have together. We are not going to be dragged down to the level of the people who do these acts.”

He said he wished more people would question the need for "this kind of violence. It is futile.

“This won’t be the last attack, we know that, but it is important to know that Dvir didn’t come to Roots because it was fun. He was coming because what we were doing was very real.”

Elizabeth Harris-Sawczenko, director of the Council of Christians and Jews, which takes groups of Christians and Jews to visit the work the group does as part of a study tour of Israel and Palestine, said it always has a strong impact on participants.

She told the JC it provided people with the chance "to hear from Palestinians and Israelis who are in dialogue to envision and support a better future".

"The visit always has a strong impact on participants as too often the narrative back in UK is that one has to support either Palestinians or Israelis.

"The dialogue at Roots is a lesson to us all: you need to support both Palestinians and Israelis and listen and learn from different narratives.

"The human encounter is the only way forward. We mourn the deaths of Dvir Sorek and Ahmad Manasra, two young Roots participants who were committed to a better future for Palestinians and Israelis."