Gaza militants killed by Israel were 'senior Al Qaeda affiliates'

Two Gaza militants killed by Israel on Saturday were the most senior Al Qaeda affiliates in the Palestinian enclave, and one had links to jihadi networks in Egypt, Jordan and Iraq, sources say.

Palestinian Ahmed cries over the death of his father, Salafist leader Hisham Al Saedni, during his funeral at Al Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip yesterday.

Gaza // Two Gaza militants killed by Israel on Saturday were the most senior Al Qaeda affiliates in the Palestinian enclave, and one had links to jihadi networks in Egypt, Jordan and Iraq, sources said yesterday.

Hisham Al Saedni and Ashraf Al Sabah, who were killed by an air strike as they rode a motorcycle, were ultraconservative Salafi Islamists.

Armed Salafis, while a fringe presence in Gaza, have been stepping up violence against Israel while at times clashing with the Palestinian Hamas government. They also operate in the neighbouring Egyptian Sinai.

Saedni and Sabah were leaders, respectively, of the Tawhid wa-Jihad and Ansar Al Sunna groups, two Salafi sources said. The movements share Al Qaeda's vision of global jihad and opposed the more pragmatic Islamism espoused by Hamas and Cairo's politically dominant Muslim Brotherhood.

The men had recently merged their groups to form the umbrella Majles Shoura Al-Mujahideen (Holy Warriors' Guidance Council), the sources said, becoming the de facto heads of the diffuse Gaza jihadi network.

"Their blood will be a light to guide the holy warriors through the right path and will be fire that will burn the Jews," one of the sources told Reuters, saying reprisals would not be limited to the short-range rocket launches that are Gaza militants' favoured mode of attack on Israel.

The Salafi sources said Gaza-born Saedni, 47, had lived in Egypt and Jordan and had fought for Al Qaeda in Iraq. He had been wanted by Egypt on suspicion of involvement in attacks on tourist sites there.

Israel said the militant, who was freed from a Hamas jail in August after 11 months' locked up, had been behind a string of rocket and bomb attacks against the country and had planned to carry out a militant operation on its Sinai border.

"The Global Jihad is stepping up its efforts to target us, and we will continue to interdict it with aggression and might, in terms of both response and pre-emption," prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Israeli cabinet in Jerusalem yesterday.

In a sign of Salafi assertiveness in Gaza, about 500 mourners attended Saedni's and Sabah's funerals. Some wore the smocks typical of the Al Qaeda bastions in Pakistan and Afghanistan but relatively uncommon among Palestinians.