The attacker, a Bedouin male who had tried to join the Islamic State, was killed.
On Tuesday, in a city called Beersheba in the southern part of Israel, a knife-wielding guy slashed five people and ran over another, taking the total number of dead people to four.
Armed neighbours, including a bus driver, responded to the incident in Beersheba, shooting the perpetrator dead, police said.
Following the bloodshed at a gas station and on a roadway outside a neighbouring shopping centre, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett promised to crack down on “terrorists.”
A witness, identified as Liraz Zrihan, 25, was washing her car at the gas station when the attack began. She observed the assailant circling with a long knife, “like a sword,” she added.
The assailant stabbed one woman at a gas station, ran over a guy in his sixties on a bicycle, then stabbed others outside a shopping centre before being shot by locals.
The suspect has not been identified by the police yet.
Mohammed Abu al-Kiyan, a former teacher from the Bedouin settlement of Hura near Beersheva, is said to have been the attacker.
In 2015, Israel detained six Bedouins, four of whom were teachers.
Prime Minister Naftali Bennett praised those who shot the alleged attacker, saying they were resourceful and brave, and they kept more people from getting hurt.
The pm later took it to Twitter, tweeting that “The police are on high alert. We will fight terrorism. We will also pursue those who aid them.
That attack was an “individual” incident, the Abu al-Kiyan Bedouin tribe said late Tuesday, not representative of the tribe’s “law-abiding members who have always believed in cooperation.”
People in the Gaza Strip who are part of the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas say Israel’s treatment of them was the reason for them to start fighting.
Hamas-run radio says that the action is a response to Israel’s plan to move Palestinians from their homes in occupied land.
This is the seventh stabbing incident against Israelis this month, “UN peace envoy Tor Wennesland said in a statement.
“He is more concerned about the violence that takes place every day in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel,” the UN representative said.
Ned Price, a spokesperson for the State Department, said the US “strongly condemns the heinous attack.”
Attacks by lone Palestinians, including stabbing and car-ramming, are regular in Israel.
Recent violence has mostly happened in east Jerusalem, the Palestinian area captured by Israel following the 1967 Six-Day War, or in the West Bank, which Israel has occupied since 1967.
In the last few years, attacks that killed many Israelis have been very rare, and the south, especially Beersheba, has been mostly safe.
Bedouins, who make up 20% of Israel’s Arab population, have battled with security forces over land disputes.
A leader of the Islamist Raam party, Mansour Abbas, didn’t like it. Bennett’s government is supported by the party, and Bedouin voters were happy with it last year.
“The Raam party condemns the criminal crime in Beersheba and expresses condolences to the families of the victims,” he wrote on his Facebook page.
The Hura municipal council also called the incident “criminal and terrorist”.
AFP reported that hundreds of Jewish nationalist protestors gathered nearby late at night, waving Israeli flags and screaming “death to Arabs.”
Published By :- Tarsem Singh
Edited By :- Khushi Thakur
