The tension does not fall: three people were wounded by bullet in Tel Aviv in a “terrorist attack” whose author was shot dead by the Israeli police, Thursday, March 9. The shootings took place on Dizengoff Avenue, popular with night owls, in the heart of Tel Aviv – where a Palestinian attack killed three people in April 2022 – while opponents of the government’s judicial reform plan demonstrated elsewhere in the city. city.
“We evacuated three gunshot wounds, one in critical condition, one seriously injured, and one light,” Eli Bin, director of Magen David Adom (MDA), Israel’s equivalent of the Red Cross, said earlier. on Kan, the public television channel.
Without claiming responsibility for the attack, the Islamic Jihad issued a statement seeing in the “Tel Aviv operation […] a natural response to the crimes of the occupation”. Reached by telephone by Agence France-Presse in Nilin, a Palestinian town near Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, Salah Khawajah said he learned on social media that his son Motaz Khawajah, 23, known as a Hamas sympathizer, was the perpetrator of the attack. A condolence ceremony has begun in this city, according to a neighbor.
“Serious attack in Tel Aviv […] I congratulate the policeman who, in a courageous act, eliminated the heinous terrorist and saved many lives”, declared then the Minister of Internal Security, Itamar Ben Gvir, according to a press release issued by his office.
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, on an official visit to Rome, wished “a speedy recovery to the injured” in a brief televised intervention.
The three Palestinians shot dead in the West Bank
The attack comes in a climate of high tension and a marked upsurge in violence linked to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since the entry into office at the end of December of one of the most right-wing governments in the history of Israel, under the leadership of by Mr. Netanyahu.
Three armed Palestinians, including two Islamic Jihad fighters, were killed Thursday morning during an Israeli military operation in the northern occupied West Bank. Islamic Jihad and Hamas, another Palestinian Islamist movement, have promised to avenge their deaths.