Israel kills dozens in Lebanon after failed mission to find pilot’s remains | Lebanon

An Israeli operation to find the remains of a famous IDF pilot in eastern Lebanon failed overnight as commandos engaged in a gunfight with Hezbollah and locals, and Israeli jets bombed the area with airstrikes that killed dozens of people.

According to the Lebanese army and the health ministry, three Lebanese soldiers and 41 people living in the Bekaa valley were killed in the clashes. No injuries were reported among Israeli soldiers.

According to the Lebanese army, two Israeli helicopters landed outside the towns of Nabi Chit and Khraibeh on the Syrian-Lebanese border in the eastern Bekaa valley at 22:00 on Friday night and dropped off Israeli soldiers. Israeli soldiers went to a cemetery in Nabi Chit and began digging a grave suspected to hold the remains of Israeli pilot Ron Arad, who disappeared in Lebanon in 1986.

In the statement made by the Lebanese army, it was stated that the Lebanese army detected the attack and threw flares at Israeli helicopters, which led to an armed conflict between Israeli forces, local people and Hezbollah fighters.

Pro-Iran group Hezbollah also claimed that it observed Israeli helicopters landing and that its fighters, with the support of local residents, ambushed soldiers outside the cemetery. According to the Lebanese army, the clashes lasted until 3 a.m. as the Israeli army launched at least 40 airstrikes on the town, while its soldiers on the ground fought the local population and Hezbollah.

Videos of the incident show gunfire, tracer bullets constantly flying through the air, and residents calling on people from other villages to come and help repel the Israelis. Eastern Bekaa residents are heavily armed and many support Hezbollah.

Israeli airstrikes destroyed many buildings in the town of Nabi Chit, obliterated the main road and created a large crater.

Arad was an Israeli pilot whose plane was damaged by a faulty bomb while flying over southern Lebanon to attack PLO targets. He was captured by the Amal movement, which consists of Shiite militias, and was handed over to Hezbollah. No evidence of life has been produced by her captors since the late 1980s, and an Israeli government commission concluded in 2004 that she died in the mid-1990s.

The Israeli government continued to try to find his remains, and then-prime minister Naftali Bennett said in 2021 that Israeli intelligence had kidnapped an Iranian general from Syria as part of the search for Arad.

A former officer who previously participated in the search for Arad’s remains said the operation would be based on new intelligence.

“They would find a new lead and decide to act on it,” the officer said. “The fact that a major war is ongoing does not change anything. There is an obligation to put an end to this tragedy,” they added.

In December, retired Lebanese general security officer Ahmed Shukr was abducted from the town of Nabi Chit by unknown persons after being taken to the rural Bekaa valley to inspect a property. Lebanese officials suspected that he had been captured by Israeli intelligence and taken to Israel for interrogation, as his brother Hassan was suspected by Israeli intelligence of being involved in Arad’s capture.

A photo of the tombstone that Israelis dug up in Nabi Chit on Friday night showed that it belonged to someone named Hussein Shukr.

Arad’s widow, Tami Arad, released a statement on social media thanking those who participated in the operation, but said the family did not want the lives of Israeli soldiers to be put at risk during the search for his remains.

“For 40 years we have lived with the fact that Ron is missing, we want to know what happened to Ron, but not at any cost. We prefer to live with the painful possibility that Ron’s bones are in Lebanon, rather than waking up in the morning to the news that an IDF soldier has been injured or, God forbid, killed in an operation to return his bones, if they are indeed his bones,” he said.

Last year, Israeli President Isaac Herzog said Israel “should never stop its efforts to bury Arad in Israel.”

“This is the supreme agreement between a state and its soldiers, and one that we must support even decades later,” Herzog said at the memorial ceremony for the missing soldiers.