Israel abducted 2 Iranian generals and killed one during Ron Arad search, NYT reports

Israeli agents kidnapped two Iranian generals over two decades and killed one during the search for missing airman Ron Arad, The New York Times reported Sunday.

The investigation drew on interviews with dozens of Israeli, Iranian and American officials. It said the generals were taken separately from Syria and Turkey.

Arad bailed out of his plane over southern Lebanon in 1986 and has been missing ever since. Israel declared him dead in 2008, but its military says he is the only Israeli service member still classified as missing in action.

"In every international encounter we had, we were asked about Ron Arad, Ron Arad," Mohammad Ali Abtahi, Iran's vice president at the time, told the Times.

In September 2021, Israeli intelligence officers disguised as movers seized Revolutionary Guards Gen. Abdullah Saberi in Damascus after he left for an early-morning jog, the Times said, citing Iranian officials close to him and a Syrian official.

Two men carrying an oversize refrigerator box restrained and drugged Saberi, then placed the box over his head and forced him into a white van, the Times reported.

A Syrian official who watched video of the abduction said Saberi was taken to Israel. Iranian sources said interrogators there questioned him solely about Arad. Following a lengthy interrogation, Saberi was left on a Johannesburg, South Africa, street, the Times reported.

Saberi later said he was tortured.

David Barnea, the Mossad director at the time, said he had authorized a daring but unsuccessful operation to obtain information about Arad, The Jerusalem Post reported.

The other general, Alireza Asgari, had served as Iran's deputy defense minister and belonged to the Revolutionary Guards Quds Force. He disappeared from an Istanbul hotel in December 2006.

Three former U.S. officials told the Times that Mossad agents kidnapped Asgari, who had been stationed in Lebanon shortly after Arad's capture. Former U.S. officials said the agents questioned Asgari aboard a boat for weeks, then killed him and dumped his body into the Black Sea after finding no evidence that he knew anything about Arad.

Israel has denied involvement in Asgari's disappearance.

Saberi had an earlier role in the search. During prisoner-exchange negotiations in 2004, Iran assigned him to oversee a search in Lebanon for evidence of Arad's fate, according to the investigation.

Israel interpreted Saberi's assignment as evidence that the Revolutionary Guards had held Arad, and an Israeli intelligence report in 2005 concluded the Guards had taken him.

A 2006 Shin Bet review reached a different conclusion, the Times reported. Led by then-director Yuval Diskin, it found that neither Iran nor Hezbollah had held Arad, but the government and the Mossad largely ignored the findings.

Raz Zimmt, who participated in the 2005 assessment, told the Times that he now thinks it was probably mistaken.

Israeli officials told the Times their leading theory is now that Arad was executed in retaliation for the death of Ahmad Shukr's brother in a 1988 battle with Israeli troops. Shukr, a retired Lebanese security official, disappeared in December 2025, and Lebanese officials believe Israeli agents abducted him.

Former Israeli officials said Shukr was among the few people suspected of knowing Arad's whereabouts in 1988, though his niece said he had no connection to the case.

In March, Israeli troops searched for Arad's remains in the Lebanese village of Nabi Chit, opening a grave in its cemetery but finding nothing. Local officials said accompanying Israeli airstrikes killed at least 41 people, while The Jerusalem Post reported that dozens of Lebanese were killed and wounded.

"The operation carried out last night did not produce what we were looking for," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said after the March raid, adding that his commitment to missions concerning prisoners and missing persons was absolute.

Arad's widow later said in a statement that the family did not want Israeli soldiers to risk their lives searching for his remains. Officials told the Times the search continues in Lebanon.