Palestinian attacker wounds 8 in Tel Aviv as Israel presses West Bank operation

From AP via NPR 

JENIN, West Bank (AP) — A Palestinian man drove his car into a crowded bus stop in Tel Aviv on Tuesday and then began stabbing people, wounding eight in an attack praised by the Islamist militant group Hamas as a response to Israel’s ongoing military operation in the occupied West Bank.

Police chief Kobi Shabtai told reporters at the scene that an armed civilian shot and killed the assailant.

The assailant drove a pickup truck into pedestrians close to a bus stop on the coastal city’s busy Pinchas Rosen Street before leaving his vehicle to stab one of the victims in the neck.

In CCTV footage of the attack, a figure in dark clothes can be seen running from where the car had stopped, straddling a bike lane, running among the seating of a pavement cafe where he tries to stab a man attempting to tackle him. As he flees he can be seen being intercepted by a motorcyclist who shoots him.

A second video posted online captures the scene a few moments later, as the motorcyclist, in grey shorts and T-shirt and wearing a white helmet, kicks away a knife in the hand of the attacker as he lies wounded on the ground before approaching him and shooting him a second time.

Khaled Al-Batsh, a senior official from the Iranian-backed Islamic Jihad movement praised the attack as “an initial and natural response of the resistance towards what is happening in Jenin.”

The Hamas militant group praised Tuesday’s attack in Tel Aviv as “heroic and revenge for the military operation in Jenin” and later claimed the driver was a member, though it was not immediately clear if the attacker was dispatched by the group or acted on his own.

The Shin Bet domestic security agency identified the attacker as Abed al-Wahab Khalila, 20, from the southern West Bank town of As-Samu, near Hebron, after some reports named another individual.

A spokesperson for the Magen David Adom ambulance service said some of the eight people injured had knife wounds