Seven injured in Tel Aviv attack

AFP/Tel Aviv

A Palestinian street vendor displays plastic toys for sale in front of a Hamas billboard in the market of the southern Gaza Strip town of Rafah yesterday, ahead of the Eid al-Fitr holiday. Hamas’ military wing, the Ezzeddine al-Qassam Brigades, had installed several billboards across the impoverished border town bearing pictures of a Hamas militant in combat at the start of Ramadan to congratulate the Palestinian people on the start of the fasting month

Seven people were wounded early yesterday when a Palestinian crashed a stolen taxi into a group of border guards outside a Tel Aviv nightclub, then attacked them with a knife, police said. Four border guards and two would-be club goers were hurt in the attack which took place outside HaOman 17 nightclub in south Tel Aviv, police spokeswoman Luba Samri said, adding one was critically injured and two others were in serious condition. “At 1.40am the attacker, a young man of 20 from (the northern West Bank city of) Nablus, stole a taxi in Tel Aviv,” Samri told AFP, saying the taxi driver had been lightly wounded in the hand when he was dragged out of his car. “He then rammed a group of border police who were standing in front of HaOman 17, injuring two of them,” she said. “Then he got out of the car and attacked passersby and the border guards with a knife, injuring another four people—two of them border guards—while shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’,” she added. The attacker sustained light injuries as he was subdued, and was taken for interrogation by the Shin Bet internal security agency, she said. “The police have been in a state of very high alert and have increased the number of patrols across the country since the attacks north of Eilat,” she said, referring to a series of attacks by gunmen on August 18 which killed eight Israelis on a desert road near the Red Sea resort town. Official Palestinian news agency Wafa quoted a statement from President Mahmoud Abbas’s office as condemning yesterday’s attack. “The presidency condemns aggression directed at civilians, including the incident that was carried out in Tel Aviv this morning,” it said.  Official Palestinian silence over the Eilat attack sparked widespread Israeli criticism at the time. Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch said yesterday that the Tel Aviv incident appeared to be the work of an individual acting alone and not that of a militant group. “We call it the lone attacker scenario,” he told public radio. “As far as I know at this moment it’s not a network but a person, a terrorist who took the initiative, for whatever motive, and went and carried out an attack.” Defence Minister Ehud Barak, however, linked the incident to the Palestinians’ plan to seek UN membership next month, which Israeli officials fear may be accompanied by waves of unrest. “We experienced this morning a stabbing and running-down almost at the start of the month of September,” a statement from his office quoted him as saying.   “The Shin Bet, the police and the military will be deployed in order not to allow attackers to disrupt normal life in Tel Aviv or in our (other) cities.” Security forces were on alert for a possible repeat of the desert attacks, he said. “We are also on high alert this morning in the south, facing a possible attack, similar in some of its aspects to the attack which took place 10 days ago,” he said.