Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Ziyad Al-Nakhala said on Friday that his group would target the Israeli capital, Tel Aviv with missiles “in the coming hours.” Earlier, Israel killed a senior commander of the militant organization in an airstrike.
“Metropolitan Tel Aviv will be one of the targets of the resistance missiles, and the coming hours will prove to the enemy that all the resistance forces are one and we will fight them as one man,” Al-Nakhala said in remarks reported by Palestine’s Quds News Network.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have meanwhile deployed Iron Dome missile defense batteries near the cities of Beersheba, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem. Flights have been diverted from Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv and bomb shelters in the city have been made ready, the Times of Israel reported.
The IDF launched airstrikes on the Palestinian enclave of Gaza earlier on Friday, killing PIJ commander Taysir al-Jabari. The strikes, dubbed ‘Operation Breaking Dawn’ by the IDF, targeted between 10 and 20 PIJ terrorists, and killed members of a “terrorist squad” who were “on their way to carry out an anti-tank missile and sniper attack,” the Israeli military claimed.