After hours of manhunts, Israeli police located and shot Friday a Palestinian who killed at least two people in the heart of Tel Aviv, an attack that again mourns Israel. “Following a difficult night and long hours of searches by the police, the internal security services and the army, we succeeded this morning (…) in tightening the noose around the terrorist who was killed in an exchange of fire,” police chief commissioner Yaacov Shabtai said. The assailant, a Palestinian from the occupied West Bank according to the police, was killed near a mosque in the Jaffa sector, a few kilometers from the site of the attack which caused scenes of chaos according to witnesses.
Thursday, around 9:00 p.m. (6:00 p.m. GMT), the man opened fire on Dizengoff Street, an artery in the center of the coastal metropolis known for its cafes, bars and restaurants, killing two people and injuring a dozen, some of them seriously.
The security forces were immediately deployed in force launching a manhunt. “It’s an atmosphere of war, soldiers and police everywhere. They searched a restaurant, people were crying and running in all directions,” Binyamin Blum, an employee at a restaurant near the scene, told AFP. the attack.
“People were falling”
Dror Yeheskel, 39, was having a drink with his brother on Dizengoff Street when the shooting started. “People started running towards a restaurant shouting ‘there is a terrorist’. We ran inside the restaurant. In the crush, people were falling. Staff were pushing people towards the kitchen. We were piled up and panicked,” he told AFP. Immediately after the attack Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said: “No matter where this terrorist is hiding, we will find him. And whoever helped him, indirectly or directly, will pay the price”.
According to the Shin Beth, the Israeli internal intelligence service, the assailant was 28 years old and named Raed Hazem. He is a Palestinian with “no known affiliation” to an armed faction and was from the Jenin area in the northern West Bank, a Palestinian territory occupied by Israel since 1967.
It is from this region where was also from the author of an attack which killed five people on March 29, including two Ukrainians and an Israeli Arab policeman, in Bnei Brak, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish town located on the outskirts of Tel- Aviv. In the wake of this attack, the army had carried out raids in Jenin during which three fighters of the Islamic Jihad, the Palestinian armed movement, had been killed. Based in the Palestinian enclave of Gaza, Islamic Jihad “welcomed” Thursday’s attack as a “natural response” to Israel’s “crimes”. Hamas, the ruling movement in Gaza, called it a “heroic operation”.
Series of attacks
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken condemned the “terrorist attack” and said his country was “in regular contact with Israeli partners, with whom we stand resolutely in the face of senseless terrorism and violence.” Since March 22, at least 13 people have died in a series of attacks in Israel. Before the attack on Thursday evening and that of Bnei Brak, two Israeli police officers were killed in a shooting claimed by the jihadist organization Islamic State in Hadera (north), on March 27. On March 22, in Beersheva, a large city in the southern Negev desert, four Israelis were killed in a stabbing and car-ramming attack perpetrated by a teacher sentenced to four years in prison for planning to go to Syria in order to fight within the IS. The latest attack in Tel Aviv comes as police were on high alert for the first major Friday prayer of the fasting month of Ramadan at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian area of East Jerusalem. Last year, clashes between Palestinians and Israeli police on the sidelines of Ramadan rallies in East Jerusalem led to an 11-day war between Hamas and Israel.