Body of Israeli who died in car accident abducted from Jenin hospital

Initial reports suggested that the body of a young Druze Israeli man involved in a car accident on Tuesday was abducted from a hospital in the Palestinian city of Jenin; but the uncle of Tiran Fero, 18, is calling it murder.

After the car accident, initial reports said the two Israelis were evacuated to a local hospital for treatment, with one patient “succumbing to his wounds” and the other transferred to an Israeli hospital shortly afterwards.

But according to Tiran’s uncle, Edri Fero, “He was sedated and on life support, he was alive.”

“They were shooting in the air and shouting in Arabic… nobody dared to stop them,” Edri Fero told Kan public broadcaster on Wednesday. “They disconnected him from the machines and tossed him into a car.”

Edri Fero’s testimony to Kan indicates he was a firsthand witness to the kidnapping.

“We saw them with our own eyes. They were armed; they came as if it was the intifada. If we hadn’t complied, we would have been kidnapped ourselves. We barely escaped and hid somewhere until [Israeli] security forces got us out,” he said.

The al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades – a coalition of armed Palestinian groups in the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria – was the first to publish Tiran Fero’s identity on social media; while local reports suggested the masked Arabs responsible for the theft, or kidnapping, might be affiliated with the Islamic Jihad terrorist organization.

A statement from the Israeli Defense Forces did not refer to Fero by name but said he and another Israeli citizen had crossed the Gilboa Border Crossing into Samaria and entered the city of Jenin, where the car accident occurred.

Palestinian sources suggest the body is being held in the Jenin Refugee Camp, and the Israeli military said early Wednesday that it expected the body to be returned to his family as soon as possible – “as a humanitarian step.”