Jerusalem (EFE).- An Italian died and seven people were injured tonight in an allegedly intentional hit-and-run in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv, all of them tourists from Italy and the United Kingdom. The attacker, an Arab-Israeli man, was also killed, Israeli media and emergency medical services reported.
Members of the Magen David Adom (MDA) emergency service declared a 36-year-old Italian man dead and evacuated seven people who were hit by a car to the hospital, a spokesman for the medical organization specified in a statement.
Among the injured, three people are in moderate condition, while four others were slightly injured, MDA said. All of them would be tourists, two Italians and five British.
intentional run over
According to police, a driver of a vehicle ran over several pedestrians on a central avenue in the Tel Aviv waterfront area until it overturned.
After that, agents in the area saw that the driver was trying to pick up a weapon, before which they shot and killed him, a police spokesman specified.
According to media, the alleged perpetrator of the attack was an Arab-Israeli from Kafer Qasem, a town with an Arab majority in central Israel.
uptick in violence
This incident comes amid a sharp uptick in violence in the region in the midst of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and after another attack today that killed two Israeli women in the occupied West Bank.
After the attack in Tel Aviv, the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, summoned reserve units of the Border Police to deploy as reinforcements in the face of the escalation of violence in the region.
Israel carried out several retaliatory attacks this past morning against the Gaza Strip and southern Lebanon, after the firing of rockets by Palestinian militants after days of clashes between Palestinians and Israeli forces at the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.
high mortality
This 2023 has been the deadliest beginning of the year in the framework of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict since 2000. In the few more than three months since the beginning of this year, 18 people have died in attacks committed by Palestinians or Arabs- Israelis, while at least 92 Palestinians have been killed in various kinds of violent incidents with Israel.
In the last year, the city of Tel Aviv – a liberal area and rather isolated from the conflict dynamics in the rest of the region – has been the target of several attacks that have caused deaths.