(Tel-Aviv) A new armed attack, causing scenes of chaos in the heart of Tel-Aviv, left at least two dead and many injured Thursday evening, still mourning Israel after a recent series of attacks.
Posted at 4:01 p.m.
Magen David Adom, the equivalent of the Israeli Red Cross, said 16 injured were transferred to local hospitals in connection with the attack on Dizengoff Street, in the heart of Tel Aviv with its bars and cafes .
“We received several serious injuries with different types of injuries, mainly to the chest, abdomen and some to the face. […] unfortunately two of them have died and we are currently fighting to save lives,” the director of Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv, Ronni Gamzu, told AFP.
Witnesses on the spot told AFP that they heard gunshots and saw scenes of chaos in the center of Tel Aviv where the Israeli police were heavily deployed.
“It’s an atmosphere of war, soldiers and police everywhere…they searched the restaurant, people are crying and running in all directions,” Binyamin Blum, who works at a restaurant near the scene, told AFP. of the attack.
Dror Yeheskel, 39, was quietly having a drink with his brother on Dizengoff Street when the attack began.
“At 9:03 p.m. people started running towards a restaurant shouting “there is a terrorist”. We ran inside the restaurant. In the crush, people were falling on top of each other. Staff were pushing people into the kitchen. We were crowded and a little panicked,” he told AFP.
Brenda Ehrlich, 31, an insurance broker from Holon, a town on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, was on a bus traveling through the metropolis when she heard about the attack: “I feel on high alert. I feel as if I have to look in all directions so as not to be taken by surprise (by a shooter).
Manhunt
The police asked the population not to go out in order to avoid being the target of fire or hampering the work of the officers who were conducting a manhunt.
“The terrorist has fled and we are doing everything we can to track him down,” Israeli police spokeswoman Mirit Ben Mayor said on Dizengoff Street, adding that “hundreds” of officers were on the heels of the assailant
Prime Minister Naftali Bennett held talks with the country’s senior security officials at the end of which he decided to “reinforce” the presence of the police in Tel Aviv.
“It was a very difficult night […] no matter where this terrorist is hiding, we will find him. And whoever helped him, indirectly or directly, will pay the price,” Bennett said, after the fourth attack in less than three weeks in Israel that left at least 13 people dead.
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 in Hadera (north).
And 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 in 2016 to four years in prison for planning to 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.
On Thursday night, the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas “celebrated” a “heroic operation” and Islamic Jihad “welcomed” an attack it sees as a “natural response” to Israel’s “crimes”, including the recent raid in Jenin.
The attack in Tel Aviv comes as police were already on high alert for the first major Friday prayer since the start of Ramadan at the Jerusalem Mosque compound.
Last year clashes between Palestinians and Israeli police on the sidelines of Ramadan rallies in East Jerusalem, an area occupied since 1967 by Israel, led to an 11-day war between Hamas, in power in the Gaza Strip, and Israel.