At least nine people have been injured, three of them seriously, in a car ramming and stabbing attack in Tel Aviv a day after Israel launched a large-scale military operation in the West Bank city of Jenin.
According to a police spokesperson, the attacker was a Palestinian resident of the occupied West Bank, who was shot and killed at the scene by a passerby. The attack came as Israel’s top policeman warned of the risk of further incidents as the military operation in the West Bank continued.
Hamas later claimed the 20-year-old was a member of the militant Islamist group and was retaliating for the Israeli assault on Jenin.
The assailant drove a pickup truck into pedestrians close to a bus stop on the coastal city’s busy Pinchas Rosen Street before leaving his vehicle to stab one of the victims in the neck.
In CCTV footage of the attack, a figure in dark clothes can be seen running from where the car had stopped, straddling a bike lane, running among the seating of a pavement cafe where he tries to stab a man attempting to tackle him. As he flees he can be seen being intercepted by a motorcyclist who shoots him.
A second video posted online captures the scene a few moments later, as the motorcyclist, in grey shorts and T-shirt and wearing a white helmet, kicks away a knife in the hand of the attacker as he lies wounded on the ground before approaching him and shooting him a second time.
Later, the unidentified man described what happened in quotes reported in the Israeli media.
“After he crashed into the stop, he climbed out and stabbed someone. I thought maybe it was a bad case of road rage, but then he left that person and started chasing others. I pulled out my gun and closed in on him.
“He’s tall and intimidating man, I told myself he could kill 10 people, if not more. … I fired two more shots at him, and then he fell. Everything happened quickly.”
A paramedic with the Magen David Adom emergency service described arriving to see several of the victims being treated on the pavement.
“We arrived at the scene with a large force of MDA intensive care vehicles and ambulances. We saw that it was very serious, and near a bus stop there were five injured people, including a 46-year-old woman … lying on the sidewalk while she was conscious and suffering from severe trauma.”
The wounded were transported to hospitals in Tel Aviv, Petah Tikva and Kfar Saba. Three of the injured were being treated for multiple injuries and one is being operated on for chest injuries.
The Hamas militant group praised the attack as “heroic and revenge for the military operation in Jenin”.
The Shin Bet domestic security agency identified the attacker as Abed al-Wahab Khalila, 20, from the southern West Bank town of As-Samu, near Hebron, after some reports named another individual.
Israel’s police commissioner, Yaakov Shabtai, who visited the scene of the incident, warned of the risk of other attacks amid Israel’s military incursion into Jenin, which has so far claimed the lives of 10 Palestinians.
Shabtai said that the attacker had been driving against traffic at high speed and crashed into a bus stop, sending people flying into the air.
Commenting on the investigation he said: “Circumstances are being examined regarding his background and motive, and I would like to praise the activity of the citizen with a lot of courage, that he was able to thwart the attack and prevent the continuation of that terrorist’s killing spree.”
The attack came as Israeli troops pressed ahead with their hunt for Palestinian militants and weapons in the West Bank, after military bulldozers tore through alleys and thousands of residents fled to safety. The raid on the Jenin refugee camp, which began on Monday, is one of the most intense military operations in the occupied West Bank in nearly two decades.
It bore the hallmarks of Israeli military tactics during the second Palestinian uprising in the early 2000s and comes as Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, faces growing pressure from his ultranationalist political allies for a tough response to recent attacks on Israeli settlers, including a shooting last month that killed four people.
