TEL AVIV – A Palestinian gunman was killed by Israeli police after he fatally shot dead two Israelis and wounded at least 15 others in a popular pub in downtown Tel Aviv on Thursday night, Israeli authorities said.
The shooting comes amid a wave of terrorist attacks in recent weeks, the deadliest to hit Israel in years. Thirteen people have been killed in terrorist attacks by Palestinians in Israel or the West Bank on March 22.
Israeli police say the shooter, a man from the Jenin refugee camp in the North West, shot at the Ilka pub on Dizengoff Street, one of the busiest shopping and nightclubs in Tel Aviv, just before 9pm on Thursday weekend. in Israel. He then fled the scene.
Police ordered residents to enter, lock their doors and stay away from their windows as hundreds of police searched the city, searching yards and construction sites in pursuit of the attacker. Videos posted on social media show that emergency workers loaded the victims on stretchers and worked to clear the rubble while helicopters gleamed from above.
The gunman was found and killed in a shootout with Israeli police around 6 a.m. Friday morning near a mosque in central Jaffa, a mixed Jewish-Arab neighborhood south of Tel Aviv. He was identified as Raed Hazem, 29, and remained in Israel without permission from the Jenin refugee camp. The camp is a hotbed of political and military activity in the North West Coast.
The two Israelis killed by the shooter are men in their late 20s, according to Israeli emergency services. More than a dozen others, also in their 20s and 30s, received gunshot wounds to the chest and abdomen, medics said.
“It was a very difficult night. And all who helped [the terrorist] it will pay a price indirectly or directly, “said Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett.
Bennett, along with Defense Minister Benny Ganz and Public Security Minister Omer Bar-Lev, monitored the situation from the military headquarters in Tel Aviv, a few blocks from the site of the attack, their offices said.
The US ambassador to Israel, Tom Nides, tweeted that he was “horrified to see another cowardly terrorist attack on innocent civilians, this time in Tel Aviv.”
“That has to stop!” he wrote.
Bennett announced late Thursday that his government would increase security forces in Tel Aviv, in addition to the already increased number of forces recently stationed in Israel and the West Bank. Last week, Bennett called on licensed Israelis to bear arms after a Palestinian opened fire in a suburb of Tel Aviv, killing five people.
Israeli security forces were on high alert before Friday, the first Muslim holy month of Ramadan, in preparation for potential clashes near the Damascus Gate in East Jerusalem. Both Israeli and Palestinian authorities have warned of a sharp escalation of violence, especially in the next few weeks, when Ramadan will rarely coincide with Easter and Easter.
In May, also during Ramadan, clashes between Palestinians and Israelis near the Damascus Gate helped spark an 11-day war between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas, which controls Gaza.
In a statement on its website on Thursday, Hamas praised the attack in Tel Aviv, calling it a “heroic operation” that led to the killing of a number of occupation soldiers and Zionist settlers.
Steve Hendrix of Jerusalem and Hazem Balusha of Gaza contributed to this report.
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