Missing Israeli navigator Ron Arad. Photo: Israeli Air Force Archives/Facebook (Israel Hayom).

The Mossad operation that sought to determine the fate of missing Israeli pilot Ron Arad, which was revealed to the Knesset on Monday by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, involved the kidnapping and interrogation of an Iranian general, according to Arabic-language media reports.

Arad went missing in 1986 when his plane was shot down over Lebanon. It is known that he was captured by the Shia group Amal, and was later handed over to Hezbollah. Very little is known about what happened to him afterwards, but Israeli intelligence services believe that he died in 1988.

Bennett told the Knesset that the latest attempt to find Arad “was a complex and large-scale operation. That’s all we can say for the moment.”

The Israeli government has not released any new information regarding Arad’s whereabouts.

An initial report published Monday by Arabic-language news site Rai al-Youm stated that, as part of the operation, a Mossad unit kidnapped an Iranian general inside Syrian territory and took him to an unnamed country described only as “African.”

The general was then interrogated and released, apparently without revealing anything new about the fate of Arad, according to the report.

A further report by Al Arabiya cited unidentified “sources” as saying that Mossad carried out two operations in regard to the Arad case. One was the Syria kidnapping reported by Rai al-Youm, though Al Arabiya added that the general in question was retired.

The second operation took place in Lebanon, and involved the extraction of DNA from a body buried in a Lebanese village in the Bekaa Valley area, in order to determine whether the body was Arad’s. It apparently was not.