Post #5316

📰 Forty Years for a Ghost, Forty-One Dead for a Photo Op Israel just sent disguised commandos into eastern Lebanon — wearing Lebanese army uniforms, using ambulances marked with Hezbollah’s Islamic Health Organization — to dig up a grave in Nabi Chit in search of a man who almost certainly died decades ago. They didn’t find Ron Arad’s remains. They did leave at least 41 people dead and about 40 wounded, including Lebanese soldiers and civilians, after clashes and some 40 Israeli airstrikes to cover the extraction. Arad vanished in 1986 after ejecting from a jet bombing suspected Palestinian militants, was held by Shiite factions around Nabi Chit, and has long been presumed dead — Hezbollah even sent Israel a 2008 report suggesting he died while trying to escape. Yet in the middle of a regional war, with Beirut suburbs already being hammered and hundreds of thousands displaced, someone in Tel Aviv decided that digging up a Lebanese cemetery under fire was a good use of helicopters, special forces and international patience. The most surreal detail is that Arad’s own wife is begging the state to stop. Tami Arad wrote that the family wants answers but “not at any price,” and that the sanctity of living soldiers’ lives matters more than “closing the circle” on a man missing for 40 years. Israel’s military, for its part, boasts that the raid suffered no IDF casualties, as if that balances out the crater in Nabi Chit and the bodies of Lebanese conscripts and villagers pulled from the rubble. So in the middle of a war supposedly about stopping Iran and deterring Hezbollah, Israel staged a ghost hunt that killed dozens, deepened anger in Lebanon, and added one more episode to the region’s endless archive of “special operations” that achieve nothing except fresh graves. The state got a headline about its eternal commitment to missing soldiers. Everyone else got another reminder that in this conflict, the dead are props — unless they wore the right uniform, four decades and one lost war ago. #israel#lebanon#hezbollah#RonArad#war#specialForces#middleeast 📱American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸