Nearly four decades after Israeli Air Force navigator Ron Arad was captured in Lebanon, an investigative report published Sunday by The New York Times unveils new details regarding one of the most painful mysteries in the history of the State of Israel: the fate of the missing airman. According to Israeli officials who spoke with the newspaper, one of the primary assessments currently under examination is that Arad was executed in 1988 in the village of Nabi Chit in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, in retaliation for the death of a Shiite operative killed during a battle with Israel Defense Forces (IDF) troops. This assessment aligns with intelligence findings accumulated over the years indicating that Arad most likely died in Lebanon and was never transferred to Iran, contrary to what Israeli defense officials long believed.
According to the investigation, Israeli officials assess that Arad may have been executed in revenge for the death of the brother of Ahmed Shukr, a former Lebanese security official, who was killed in 1988 during a clash with IDF forces. Shukr himself was considered one of the few individuals who may have possessed direct knowledge of Arad’s fate and potential burial site. Israeli and Lebanese sources noted that he was among the handful of people suspected of knowing what transpired in Nabi Chit during the year Arad vanished.
The report notes that last December, Shukr left his home for what he believed was a meeting concerning a commercial deal and has not been seen since. Sources in Lebanon assess that he was abducted by Israeli agents, though his whereabouts have not been disclosed. In an interview with the newspaper, his niece, Rana Shukr, denied that her uncle had any connection to the Ron Arad affair.
The saga began on October 16, 1986, when the Phantom fighter jet in which Ron Arad was serving as navigator was hit during an operational mission over Lebanon. Arad, then 28, ejected from the aircraft and was captured by operatives of the Shiite Amal movement. Responsibility for holding him fell to Mustafa Dirani, a senior figure in Amal’s security apparatus.
In 1994, Israeli special forces abducted Dirani from Lebanon and brought him to Israel for interrogation. During questioning, Dirani stated that he had held Arad in a house in Nabi Chit under the watch of a local family he trusted. According to his account, one night the guards tasked with watching the navigator fled the house, apparently due to Israeli military activity in the area, and when they returned, Arad was gone. Dirani maintained he did not know what happened to him afterward.
While Dirani’s account became one of the central investigative leads in the case, officials in Israel continued for years to assess that, following his disappearance, Arad had been handed over to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). One of the most significant revelations in the Times investigation concerns a probe conducted in 2004 by Iranian and Hezbollah officials as part of efforts to locate information about the Israeli navigator. According to three former senior Iranian officials interviewed by the newspaper, the inquiry culminated in a secret report concluding that Ron Arad had most likely died in 1988 in Nabi Chit and may have been buried in the area.
The report was regarded as highly significant by the Iranian leadership. Former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani even sent one of his children to Germany to personally deliver the findings to mediators working on the case. In Israel, however, Tehran’s involvement in the search was met with deep suspicion; the fact that Iran dispatched a senior IRGC officer to help look for Arad was interpreted by intelligence officials at the time as a possible indication that Tehran was holding the airman. According to the investigation, the information gathered during those joint searches actually pointed to the likelihood that Arad never left Lebanon.
In 2006, then-Shin Bet Director Yuval Diskin ordered a comprehensive review of all intelligence material collected since Arad’s capture. In an interview with The New York Times, Diskin said the investigative team re-examined the sources, their reliability, and how the information was obtained. According to Diskin, the review established that assessments claiming Arad had been transferred to Iran were based on grave intelligence misinterpretations and unreliable reports.
The Shin Bet team concluded that the navigator had likely never been held by the IRGC or Hezbollah, and that the answer to his disappearance lay in Nabi Chit. Roughly a decade later, Avi Kalo, who headed the IDF’s POW and MIA Affairs Unit, arrived at a similar conclusion. After reviewing the accumulated intelligence files, Kalo assessed that Arad died in Lebanon in 1988, most likely in the very village where he had been held after his capture.
Kalo said that in late 2016 he submitted a detailed report outlining his conclusions to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “We should have gone there 20 years ago. It was a failure,” Kalo told The New York Times, referring to the decades in which search efforts focused on Iran rather than the Lebanese village.
According to the investigation, in 2026 Israeli forces carried out an operation in Nabi Chit in an attempt to locate Arad’s remains. During the raid, troops operated in the area of a local cemetery, excavating a grave suspected of having a possible link to the case in search of physical evidence that could shed light on his fate. The search concluded without finding the missing navigator’s remains.
Nevertheless, Israeli officials who spoke with the newspaper emphasized that efforts to locate him are continuing, noting that the investigative focus has shifted in recent years from Iran back to Lebanon. The renewed concentration on Nabi Chit—combined with the assessment that Arad was executed in revenge in 1988—may explain why decades of intelligence operations and searches across Iran failed to yield a breakthrough.