Special operation, grave searched… Israel is still looking for Ron Arad, IDF aviator captured in Lebanon in 1986

Forty years later, hope remains. Israeli special forces carried out an operation in eastern Lebanon on Friday evening to find the remains of Israeli aviator Ron Arad, captured during an air raid in that country in 1986, the army announced. Without success.

In Lebanon, the Islamist movement Hezbollah, supported by Iran, said on Saturday that it had fought an “infiltration” of the Israeli army in the Bekaa plain, near the border with Syria, a region where the Lebanese authorities reported at least 16 deaths during Israeli strikes. Throughout the night, fighter jets and exchanges of fire were heard.

In a statement, Hezbollah said its fighters had “observed the infiltration of four Israeli helicopters” coming from Syria on Friday around 10:30 p.m. After landing, “a group” of Hezbollah fighters “engaged” in combat with Israeli soldiers at a cemetery in Nabi Chit, claiming that Israeli troops had carried out intense strikes before beginning to withdraw.

Diplomatic attempts

On social networks, images, broadcast by Israeli and Lebanese TV, were looping, showing a hole dug in the brown earth of the cemetery, apparently an open and excavated grave.

Israeli air force officer Ron Arad, a navigator, ejected in 1986 from his plane, shot down over Lebanon, during a mission against the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). He was captured by the Shiite Amal group during the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990).

He was able to send letters to his family during the early days of his captivity, prompting Israeli authorities to begin talks with his captors with a view to his release. But the negotiations failed and definitively ceased in 1988.

According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Ron Arad was detained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Lebanon. Tehran has long claimed to have no information on this subject, ensuring only once at the end of the 1980s that it was aware of Arad’s fate to a certain point, before losing track of him.

Constant searches

Detained by Shiite groups in Lebanon, possibly by Hezbollah, Ron Arad is today presumed dead, his remains having never been returned. In 2016, a Mossad and IDF report concluded that he died in captivity in 1988. But the circumstances of his death remain obscure, and the IDF has never given up in its research.

In 2021, Israeli channel 12 reported that Mossad had captured an Iranian general in Syria, as part of an operation to obtain information on Arad. The general was reportedly taken to an African country, where he was interrogated before being released.

Then, last December, the Saudi news channel Al-Arabiya revealed that Lebanese security forces suspected Mossad of having captured a former Lebanese security officer, who was believed to have information regarding Arad’s fate. Could these elements have led to this Friday’s operation in Lebanon? The IDF does not specify this in its press release.

National duty

The fate of Ron Arad has worried Israel for decades, where the repatriation of missing or captured soldiers is considered a national duty. “The Israeli army will continue to carry out its operations tirelessly, day and night” to “bring back all the sons of Israel, the fallen soldiers and those missing, to their homeland,” the IDF said this Saturday.

A policy that Tami Arad, Ron’s wife, does not like. According to Israeli media, she reacted to the announcement of this operation with a letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stating that “our desire to know what happened to Ron stops as soon as he endangers Israeli soldiers”.

“In our eyes, the sanctity of life comes before the obligation to bring back the remains of a soldier for burial,” she wrote. The Israeli army assured that the operation did not cause any deaths on the Israeli side.