A new armed attack killed at least two people and injured many on Thursday evening, April 7, in the center of the Israeli metropolis Tel Aviv. Magen David Adom, Israel’s equivalent of the Red Cross, said 16 injured people had been transferred to local hospitals.
“We have so far received ten wounded but, despite the efforts of the medical staff, two of them succumbed to their injuries”, for its part, said the Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv, in a brief press release. The motive for the attack was not yet clearly established.
On Thursday evening, witnesses on the spot told Agence France-Presse (AFP) that they heard gunshots and saw scenes of chaos in the center of Tel Aviv where the Israeli police said they were deployed. “It’s a war atmosphere, soldiers and police everywhere…they have searched the restaurant, people are crying and running in all directions”a witness, who works in a restaurant near the scene of the attack, told AFP.
Fourth attack in three weeks in the country
In a press release, the security forces asked the population not to go outside in order to avoid being the target of fire. ‘Police are calling on people to stay home and allow forces to deal with the incident which is still ongoing, in order to locate suspects’she said in a statement.
Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett is on his side at army headquarters in Tel Aviv, where he receives the latest information on the shooting, his services said. This is the fourth attack in three weeks in the country, and the second in nine days in Tel Aviv.
Last week, a Palestinian from the occupied West Bank opened fire on crowds driving through the Jewish-Orthodox town of Bnei Brak, near Tel Aviv, killing five people, including two Ukrainians and an Israeli Arab policeman. A few days earlier, two police officers, including a young Franco-Israeli, had been killed in a shootout claimed by the jihadist organization Islamic State (IS) in Hadera (north).
Multiplication of operations in the occupied West Bank
On March 22, in Beersheva, a large city in the Negev desert (south), four Israelis were killed in a stabbing and car-ramming attack perpetrated by a teacher, sentenced in 2016 to four years in prison for having planned travel to Syria to fight for ISIS.
In the wake of these attacks, the Israeli army, police and internal security services arrested dozens of people suspected of having links with IS in Israel, and increased operations in the occupied West Bank, in particular in Jenin, sector of north of this Palestinian territory where the assailant of the Bnei Brak attack was from.
At least three members of the Islamic Jihad, the second Palestinian armed Islamist movement after Hamas, were killed last week during an exchange of fire in connection with these operations in Jenin.