NYT: In search for Ron Arad, Israel kidnapped senior Iranians, mistakenly believing Tehran held him

Israel kidnapped and tortured senior Iranian generals in an attempt to ascertain the whereabouts of downed Israeli airman Ron Arad, The New York Times reports, efforts that it now sees as mistakenly focused on the Islamic Republic.

The paper says a joint report by Hezbollah and Iran concluded that Arad died in Lebanon two years after his capture in Lebanon.

Arad bailed out of his plane during an operation in southern Lebanon in 1986. Israel initially believed he was captured by the Shiite Amal movement before being handed over to Iran.

In 1994, Israeli commandos abducted Mustafa Dirani, a senior member of the Amal militia team that captured and held Arad. Dirani told Israeli interrogators that he had taken the Israeli to Nabi Chit in the Beqaa valley, where he placed him under the guard of a trusted family. The guards left the house to fight Israeli soldiers nearby, and when they returned, Arad was gone, Dirani said.

Dirani, who says he was tortured during interrogations, told his captors that an Iranian official told him that the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps had taken Arad and spirited him back to Iran. That tip led to a range of conclusions in Israel. Some saw it as evidence that Tehran held him, while others dismissed it because it was extracted under duress.

“The issue of Ron Arad followed us everywhere,” Mohammad Ali Abtahi, Iran’s vice president at the time, tells The Times. “In every international encounter we had, we were asked about Ron Arad, Ron Arad.”

Iran tasked IRGC General Abdullah Saberi to oversee the search in Lebanon for Arad’s whereabouts, Israeli and Iranian officials tell The New York Times. That investigation came to the conclusion that Arad died in Nabi Chit, and was buried there.

To Israel, Saberi’s involvement was evidence that the IRGC had held Arad, and a 2005 Israeli report concluded that he had been taken by the organization.

In 2006, Mossad agents in Istanbul kidnapped IRGC-Quds Force General Alireza Asgari, who had been stationed in Lebanon shortly after Arad’s abduction, according to three former US officials. They told the NYT that Mossad agents questioned him for weeks aboard a boat, then dumped his body into the Black Sea after finding no evidence that he knew anything about Arad.

Despite mounting evidence that Iran had not taken Arad, Israel continued to pursue that angle. In 2021, Arabic-language media reported that Mossad agents kidnapped Saberi while he was jogging in Damascus, throwing him inside a van and driving off.

One report claimed the general was then taken to Israel and interrogated “intensively,” before being transferred to Johannesburg, South Africa, and released there.

According to The Times, Israel’s leading theory is that Arad was killed in 1988 in revenge for the death of Hassan Shukr, who fought in a group that took part in capturing Arad.

In March 2026, helicopter-borne Israeli commandos searched Nabi Chit, but failed to find any signs of Arad.