The IDF in Hebron. Photo: wiki commons.

Israel security forces are preparing for a new threat — Salafi jihad — after a terror plot was foiled by the Israel Defense Forces on Tuesday, when two suspects carrying explosives and handguns were killed in a raid in Hebron, where the sect is strongest, Israel’s Walla News reported on Wednesday.

A Salafi jihad group called “Hizb al – Tahrir” – the Freedom Party – has held demonstrations against both Israel and the Palestinian Authority. The group has won popular support in Hebron, considered to be more radically religious, and in East Jerusalem, where its members were involved in violent demonstrations on the Temple Mount, Walla said.

Without a defined hierarchy, the group has been harder for the IDF to pin down than groups with the more traditional structures of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, Walla said.

On Tuesday, the IDF said, “Over the past few months the members of the terrorist network acted to organize an expanded terror infrastructure which included preparing and manufacturing explosives, purchasing weapons and arranging an apartment for hiding.”

Walla said police have also arrested other suspected members of the Salafi group in Nablus in “recent days.”