At least two people have been killed and two others wounded in a stabbing attack near Tel Aviv, Israeli officials say, with police reporting a Palestinian suspect was “neutralised” and later died in hospital.
The stabbings took place during morning rush hour near a gas station and a park in the city of Holon in the south of Tel Aviv, Israel’s ambulance service said on Sunday.
The suspect, a Palestinian from the occupied West Bank, was killed by a police officer who arrived at the scene, the police said in a statement without elaborating.
“The terrorist was quickly neutralised by one of our officers at the scene and prevented him from carrying out an even worse attack,” police spokesman Eli Levi said on Israel’s Channel 12.
The police statement said they were present in force at the scene and were “conducting extensive searches with a helicopter and additional resources”.
The 66-year-old woman was pronounced dead at the scene, while her reported partner, aged about 80, was wounded, officials said. A 68-year-old victim also died in the incident and a 26-year-old was moderately wounded, the Magen David Adom emergency service said.
“This was a complex and difficult terrorist attack, with the victims located in three different places, around 500 metres [0.31 miles] from each other,” the emergency service said.
Israel’s far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir visited the scene of the incident and encouraged the citizens to take up arms, Israeli media reported.
“Our war is not only against Iran but here in the streets. This is precisely why we armed the people of Israel. More than 150,000 gun permits [were issued] in the last 8 months,” he said, according to the reports. “I call on the citizens to take up arms and use them.”
Israeli media identified the attacker as a 34-year-old man from Salfit, a town in the northern part of the occupied West Bank, who had reportedly entered Israel without a permit. Soon after the attack, Israeli forces closed the entrance to the town.
A local source told Al Jazeera more than 10 military vehicles reached his house and were preventing residents and journalists from approaching the site.
“What usually happens after such attacks [is that] Israeli forces storm the house of the attacker, interrogate family members, friends and usually demolish the home as part of their policies of destroying houses of Palestinians deemed responsible for attacking Israeli targets,” said Al Jazeera’s Niba Ibrahim, reporting from Ramallah.
Last month, an Israeli soldier was killed and a second person wounded in a stabbing attack in a shopping centre in northern Israel. The Palestinian suspect was shot dead.
Anger against Israel and its Western allies has soared in the region after the Israeli military launched a war on Gaza in October, killing nearly 40,000 Palestinians and causing widespread displacement and starvation.
The latest stabbings came amid heightened tensions in Israel and the wider Middle East as fears of a regional war following the assassination of Palestinian group Hamas’s political chief Ismail Haniyeh grow.
Haniyeh’s killing in Tehran on Wednesday came hours after Israel killed top Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut. Hamas is a Palestinians resistance movement that governed the Gaza Strip while Hezbollah is its ally in Lebanon.
Several Western governments, including the United States, the United Kingdom and France have urged their citizens to leave Lebanon immediately.
Meanwhile, an Israeli air strike early on Sunday killed at least four people in a tent camp housing displaced Palestinians inside a hospital complex in central Gaza.
Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah is the main medical facility operating in central Gaza, and thousands of people have taken shelter there after fleeing their homes in the war-ravaged enclave.
In a statement, Hamas said Sunday’s stabbing attack was a “natural response” to Israeli attacks on Palestinians and to the assassination of Haniyeh. However, it stopped short of claiming responsibility for the attack.
