The New York Times wrote on Sunday that Israel spent years treating Iran as responsible for the disappearance of navigator Ron Arad, although several internal assessments concluded he was never held there. Arad vanished on 16 October 1986, after a bomb on an F-4 detonated early over southern Lebanon and he ejected. The Israeli military still counts him as its only service member missing in action and, according to a spokeswoman quoted by the paper, regards him as alive.

The inquiries agree he was captured by the Shiite militia Amal, and that Mustafa Dirani took charge of him. In 1994 Israeli commandos kidnapped Dirani. He said he had kept Arad in the village of Nabi Chit and that, one night, the guards left and Arad was gone when they returned. Under harsh interrogation he added that the Revolutionary Guards had taken him. A Mossad officer, Igra, concluded there was no evidence Iran had held him.

In 2006 the head of the Shin Bet, Yuval Diskin, reopened the file. He told the New York Times that the reports according to which Arad had reached Iran were wrong. The team pointed to Nabi Chit. In 2016 Avi Kalo handed Benjamin Netanyahu a report with the same conclusion: Arad had probably died in 1988, in the village, and had never been in Iran. “Iran was the boogeyman,” Kalo said. Three former Iranian officials described a secret Hezbollah–Iran report, not previously published, which says he died in 1988 in Nabi Chit and was most likely buried there.

Despite those assessments, three former American officials told the paper that in December 2006 the Mossad kidnapped General Alireza Asgari, of the Quds Force, in Istanbul. His wife, Ziba Ahmadi, says he had checked into the Ceylan Hotel and that investigators told her Israeli agents drugged him in the room. One of the American officials says he was questioned on a boat and that his body was dumped in the Black Sea, with no link to Arad. Israel has denied involvement. Another former American official says that, in later talks, the Israelis told the Americans that Asgari was dead.

In September 2021 General Abdullah Saberi was kidnapped in Damascus while out jogging, according to Iranian officials close to him and a Syrian official who saw a video. Interrogators asked him only about Arad. He was later left in Johannesburg and said he was tortured. The Mossad chief at the time, David Barnea, called an operation he had authorized “courageous and daring,” but “a failure.”

Last December Ahmad Shukr, a former Lebanese security officer, disappeared. Lebanese officials believe Israeli agents took him. The closest theory of Israeli officials, the paper writes, is that Arad was executed in 1988, in revenge for the death of Shukr’s brother. His niece Rana Shukr said her uncle had nothing to do with Arad.

The Times of Israel, reporting the same investigation, writes that on 7 March 2026 commandos searched for the remains in Nabi Chit. The airstrikes killed at least 41 people in the area, according to local officials, with no Israeli casualties. Netanyahu said then that the operation “did not produce what we were looking for,” but that the commitment to the missing is absolute. The New York Times writes that soldiers opened a grave in a cemetery and found nothing. The search, officials say, continues in Lebanon.

Image: Wikimedia Commons — a Japanese F-4 Phantom at an air show in Naha, 8 December 2018 (Balon Greyjoy, CC0). The aircraft is not the one from 1986 and the photo is unrelated to Ron Arad.

Sources consulted: Doubts over who’s to blame for an Israeli hostage — The New York Times; Israel kidnapped Iranian generals in the search for Ron Arad — The Times of Israel.