After decades of covert killings, doubts emerge over Iran's role in Ron Arad's disappearance
A New York Times investigation by Adam Goldman, Ronen Bergman, Farnaz Fassihi and Hwaida Saad describes how Israeli intelligence long treated Iran as responsible for the fate of Ron Arad, an Israeli airman missing since 1986 and, according to the Israeli military, the country’s only service member still classified as missing in action. The search has captivated the Israeli public, generating articles, books and documentaries, and has come to stand for a commitment, rooted in Jewish tradition, to bring soldiers home dead or alive. At a 2025 protest in Tel Aviv, supporters of Israelis held by Hamas displayed pictures of those hostages together with images of Arad.
That conviction about Tehran, the reporters write, underpinned covert operations in which Israeli spies kidnapped and killed Iranians, while alternative explanations received little attention until now. The government remained so intent on answers that, nearly four decades after Arad disappeared, it authorized a high-risk abduction in the shadow of Iran’s embassy in Syria. In September 2021, Israeli intelligence officers posing as movers slipped past checkpoints in an upscale diplomatic quarter of Damascus. As Iranian commander Gen. Abdullah Saberi, a veteran of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, left for an early-morning jog toward a nearby park, two men with an oversize refrigerator box restrained him, drugged him, covered him with the box and pushed him into a white van. He was taken to Israel for interrogation, according to Middle Eastern officials cited by the Times, including senior Iranian officials close to Saberi and a Syrian official who reviewed video of the kidnapping. Though Saberi knew many secrets, his interrogators wanted only what he knew about Arad.
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