On July 4, 1982, four Iranian diplomats disappeared after being stopped at a checkpoint in northern Lebanon controlled by the Kataeb Party, a right-wing Lebanese Christian militia also known as the Phalange. The men were traveling in a white Mercedes when they were intercepted; they were never seen again, and their fate remains one of the Middle East's enduring mysteries. The diplomats, First Secretary Karim Anjavi, Attaché Ezzat Lahouti, reporter Mohammad Mokhtari, and student Ahmad Mottahari, were representatives of Iran's revolutionary government, which had recently come to power in 1979 and was building military and political alliances throughout the region.

The timing of the kidnapping occurred during Lebanon's civil war, when the country was fractured among competing militias and foreign powers. The Lebanese Phalange, founded in 1936, represented Christian nationalist interests and had received support from Israel, which invaded Lebanon just weeks before, on June 6, 1982. The checkpoint where the Iranians were stopped lay in a zone of active conflict where the Phalange maintained territorial control. Iran and Israel were already geopolitical adversaries, and the Iranian revolutionary government viewed Israel as an occupying power. The disappearance came amid Lebanon's broader chaos: the civil war (1975-1990) had killed tens of thousands and displaced hundreds of thousands more, while various Lebanese factions, Palestinian groups, and foreign militaries battled for dominance.

The four men were presumed dead, though no bodies were ever recovered and no credible evidence of their fate surfaced. The Phalange and related Lebanese Christian groups denied responsibility for decades. In 2018, excavations at sites in Lebanon yielded remains that DNA testing suggested might belong to the missing diplomats, but confirmation remained incomplete. The case symbolizes the countless unsolved disappearances that haunted Lebanon's war years, a wound that never fully healed. For Iran, the incident became a rallying point for claims of Western and Israeli aggression, while for Lebanon's Iranians and their families, it represented the cruel randomness of sectarian violence that consumed the country in the 1980s.