Israel announced Friday evening the mobilization of reserve police and military reinforcements after the death of three people including an Italian tourist in two attacks, against the backdrop of a new escalation of tensions in the Middle East.
At around 9:35 p.m. (2:35 p.m. EST), a driver sped into passers-by on a bike path on Kaufmann Avenue, a major thoroughfare on Tel Aviv’s waterfront, before his car swerved. a barrel roll, killing a 36-year-old man, police said.
In Rome, the head of government, Giorgia Meloni, identified him as an Italian national, Alessandro Parini, and offered his condolences to his family.
The attack also injured seven people aged 17 to 74, according to Magen David Adom, the Israeli equivalent of the Red Cross. Among those treated at Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv are four tourists: three Britons and an Italian.
A police officer and municipal officers who were nearby shot the driver after realizing that he was trying to grab a weapon, according to the police. He is a 45-year-old man from Kfar Kassem, an Arab town in central Israel.
Following the attack, which occurred on a Sabbath evening and during Passover week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “ordered the Israeli police to mobilize all reserve units of the border police, and To [l’armée] to mobilize additional forces to deal with terrorist attacks,” according to his office.
Earlier, two sisters from the Israeli settlement of Efrat, aged 16 and 20, were killed and their mother seriously injured in an attack in the West Bank.
The two sisters, of Israeli and British nationalities, were victims of Palestinian fire on their vehicle in the northeast of this Palestinian territory occupied by Israel since 1967.
The United States has assured that it “stands by” Israel following these attacks. “Targeting innocent citizens of any nationality is impermissible,” State Department spokesman Vedant Patel said in a statement.
“Unprecedented crime”
Before dawn, Israel had carried out military strikes in Gaza and southern Lebanon against positions of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, in response to the firing of dozens of rockets the day before on its territory.
This new outbreak of fever follows the irruption of Israeli forces and violence on Wednesday in the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, the third holiest site in Islam, which led to a wave of international condemnation while Hamas, in power in the Gaza Strip, denounced an “unprecedented crime” by Israel, in the middle of Ramadan.
Mr. Netanyahu claimed that the Israeli forces had been “forced to act to restore order” in the face of “extremists” barricaded in the mosque.
Without claiming it, Islamic Jihad, another Palestinian armed group, described the Tel Aviv attack as a “natural and legitimate response to the crimes and attacks of the occupation (Israel, editor’s note) against our people and our holy places”. .
In Lebanon, the Israeli army claimed to have hit three Hamas “infrastructures” in the Rashidiyé area, where there is a Palestinian refugee camp, near Tire, in the south of the country.
Thursday, in an unprecedented escalation on the Israeli-Lebanese front since 2006, around 30 rockets were fired from Lebanon towards Israel, injuring one person and causing material damage.
The Israeli army claimed that the unclaimed shots were “Palestinian”, and very likely Hamas.
Mr. Netanyahu has promised to make Israel’s “enemies” pay “a high price” for “every attack”.
Qatari mediation
“Threats and intimidation from Zionist leaders will lead nowhere,” reacted Friday Naïm Qassem, number two of the Shiite Hezbollah movement, de facto master of southern Lebanon.
On Friday, the Israeli army also said it shot down a drone that entered its territory from Lebanon, without further details.
Israel and Lebanon are technically in a state of war after different conflicts and the ceasefire line is controlled by the United Nations Interim Force (UNIFIL), deployed in southern Lebanon.
According to UNIFIL, “both sides have said they don’t want a war”.
The Lebanese army announced on Friday that it had dismantled, in the south, a new launching pad for rockets likely to be fired at Israel and Beirut assured that it wanted to preserve “calm” there.
The Israeli army said it had carried out several airstrikes in Gaza, targeting ten targets of Hamas, which has ruled there since 2007. The local health ministry reported “damage” to the al-Dorra pediatric hospital in east of Gaza City.
Qatar, which has in the past mediated between Israel and Hamas, is “working towards de-escalation” to “prevent unnecessary bloodshed and avoid destructive consequences for Palestinians and civilian populations”, the Agence France-Presse a Qatari official, on condition of anonymity.