A car-ramming attack in northern Tel Aviv on Tuesday has injured at least seven people, local media has reported. The suspect – who is also understood to have stabbed at least one passerby after exiting his vehicle – was later shot dead by a civilian, Haaretz newspaper has reported.
The assailant, named by Haaretz as a 23-year-old Palestinian medical student from the West Bank, reportedly ran over several pedestrians. One of the injured parties, a 46-year-old woman, is in a serious condition, according to the Magen David Adom rescue service.
The incident comes a day after Israel launched what was described as the biggest aerial and ground offensive in the West Bank city of Jenin in two decades, in which 10 people have reportedly been killed. Israeli military officials described it as an “extensive counterterrorism effort.”
Tel Aviv Police District Commander Ami Eshed said that Tuesday’s incident was a terrorist attack. Hamas spokesperson Hazem Kassem praised the attack as a “heroic action,” according to Haaretz, and “the first response to Israel’s crimes against our people in the Jenin refugee camp” – though the group did not claim responsibility for the attack.
Video footage from the scene appears to show a pick-up truck mount a pavement and cross a cycling path close to a bus shelter.
Victims of the incident were taken to the nearby Beilinson and Ichilov hospitals.
Another spokesperson for Hamas, Mohammed Hamedeh, said in a statement to the BBC that the “heroic” attack was a form of “legitimate self-defense against the [Israeli] occupation’s violation of all human norms.”
The statement adds: “The occupier must prepare to count his dead and injured, for the blood of our children is not cheap.”
In February, a six-year-old boy and a 20-year-old man were killed in East Jerusalem in a car-ramming attack at a bus stop. Five others were injured and the attacker was killed at the scene. The incident came a little more than a week after ten Palestinians, including two children, died in an Israeli operation in Jenin.
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