On Sunday afternoon, during the operation to locate the body of the late Staff Sergeant Major Ran Gvili in the Gaza Strip, two terrorists approached reserve soldiers from the Alexandroni Brigade while they were conducting a search.
According to a report on i24News, the terrorists were carrying weapons and an RPG launcher, and were identified within firing range. An armored force from Battalion 75 fired shells at them. The IDF is checking to see if the terrorists were eliminated.
Over the past few weeks, Israeli forces carried out covert missions, arresting terrorists and interrogating them in Israel, in an effort to locate Ran Gvili's body.
Israeli officials estimate that Gvili was already buried during the first weeks of the war. A defense official estimated that the Islamic Jihad terrorists who buried him may not have known that he was a member of the Israeli security forces.
The ground operation to locate the body was planned a while ago, but was delayed several times due to constraints of the political echelon. It was launched yesterday in a cemetery in the outskirts of the Shuja'iyya neighborhood in northern Gaza.
The cemetery was split into smaller sections in advance, and every IDF engineering crew, accompanied by dentists and members of the Military Rabbinate, was assigned to a different section.
The Shin Bet stated that approximately one month ago, in an operation in southern Gaza City, forces arrested an Islamic Jihad terrorist who was involved in military operations against IDF soldiers during the war, and brought him for interrogation by the Shin Bet.
During the interrogation, the terrorist admitted his involvement in the transfer of Ran Gvili's body between several locations and pointed to several other involved terrorists who knew the location of his burial.
The intelligence obtained during the investigation strengthened the assessment regarding the burial location at the Al-Batsh cemetery in the northern Gaza Strip.
The Shin Bet said that based on this information, a large-scale operation was carried out in the area, during which the body of Ran Gvili was identified and returned to Israel.