Two senior members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) terror group were eliminated in a fierce gun battle with IDF special forces near Jenin overnight Wednesday.

IDF forces entered Wadi Burquin, a village adjacent to Jenin, in order to arrest three Arabs suspected of terror activities, and came under heavy gunfire from local terrorists. In the ensuing fierce gun battle, two terrorists were killed, over ten were injured and four additional terror suspects were arrested.

One of the eliminated terrorists was Muhammad Ayman al-Saadi, an Islamic Jihad field commander who is responsible for a series of shooting attacks against IDF forces as well as arming other terrorists. The second terrorist, Na’im Zubeidi, the nephew of the notorious terrorist Zakaria Zubeidi, was also involved in multiple shooting attacks against IDF forces. Both terrorists were also actively planning to carry out additional attacks in the near future.

Additionally, Channel 13 News reported that Al-Saadi was one of the terrorists who murdered Israeli-Druze teen Tiran Fero by detaching him from life support and removing his body from the hospital.

In the video below, al-Saadi is seen telling the media in a previous interview that he “will scatter the corpses of IDF soldiers on the tops of the Jenin mountains.”

Following the operation, Islamic Jihad spokesman, Tariq Ezz Al-Din, said: “We are proud and celebrate the deaths of two of our most prominent leaders – the commander of the Field Battalion, Muhammad al-Saadi, and the brave martyr, the freed prisoner and the great shadow man of the resistance, Commander Naim Zabeidi, who became a martyr in the operation carried out by the Zionist special forces in the Jenin camp.”

The secretary of the Fatah movement in Jenin, Ata Abu Ramila, announced a general strike in the city in “mourning for the martyrs.”

Islamic Jihad and Hamas also issued threats of retaliatory attacks on Israel and Israeli security officials fear a further escalation of terror, rachmana latzlan, and possibly even rocket fire from Gaza.

(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)