At least two police officers died and several people were injured in an attack claimed by the Islamic State (IS) organization in the northern Israeli town of Hadera on Sunday, the day of the visit of Arab and American officials, authorities say. .
Dudu Boani, a senior police chief in the region, said the two dead were two policemen and had been killed by special forces by the assailants, two Israeli Arabs identified by Israeli intelligence as local ISIS agents.
“Two members of the Jewish police force were killed and several were injured in an attack by an undercover commando,” IS claimed in a statement released Monday on a propaganda site, indicating that two of its militants were the perpetrators of this shooting.
Footage from surveillance cameras in Hadera, a city located between Tel Aviv and Haifa, shows two men opening fire with automatic weapons in a street where cars are driving, before heading for the sidewalk.
But “two members of the Border Police counterterrorism units who were in a restaurant near the scene of the attack came out and neutralized the attackers,” an Israeli security source told AFP.
Shortly after, the security forces crisscrossed parts of Umm el-Fahm, an Arab town about twenty kilometers from Hadera, witnesses said.
Ayman Odeh, leader of the “Joined List”, a group of Arab Israeli political parties concentrating its support in the north of the country, condemned the attack, saying it “had nothing to do with the political struggle that the Arab public carries out for its rights”.
In separate statements, the Palestinian armed Islamist movements Hamas and Islamic Jihad hailed “the heroic Hadera operation”, with Hamas saying it was “carried out in response to the normalization summit on our land”.
– Negev summit –
The attack comes as Israel hosted a summit on Sunday and Monday bringing together the heads of diplomacy from the United States, Egypt, the Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco in a locality in the Negev desert (south).
Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz held evening consultations with the police and army chief, while Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who had spoken earlier in the day in Jerusalem with the Secretary of US state Antony Blinken, visited Hadera.
He spoke with local officials there, his office said.
The head of Israeli diplomacy, Yair Lapid, said he had “informed” the participants in the Negev summit. “All foreign ministers condemned the attack and conveyed their condolences to the families of the victims,” he said in a statement.
Last Tuesday, two men and two women were killed in a stabbing and ramming attack in Beersheva, the main city in the Negev desert. Stabbings against Israeli security forces occur sporadically in Jerusalem and are often carried out by Palestinians unrelated to ISIS.
But the Beersheva assailant has been identified by authorities as Mohammed Abu al-Kiyan, a teacher from the Bedouin town of Hura in the Negev, sentenced in 2016 to four years in prison for planning to travel to Syria to to fight within the EI group and for sermons making its apology.