JERUSALEM — A Palestinian man stabbed and wounded more than a dozen Israelis as he rampaged through a bus in central Tel Aviv during the Wednesday morning rush hour and then fled through nearby streets, the police said. He was shot and wounded by security forces as he tried to escape.
It was unclear whether all the stabbings took place on the bus. At least 15 Israelis were hospitalized, including several who were reported to be in serious condition. The assailant, a Palestinian man in his early 20s from the West Bank city of Tulkarm, was taken into custody, initial reports said.
The episode broke a period of relative calm that followed a spate of attacks against Israelis in October and November in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and the West Bank that were carried out by Palestinians armed with knives, cleavers and guns, or using vehicles as weapons.
In Wednesday’s attack, the assailant boarded a bus in Tel Aviv around 7:30 a.m. and first attacked the driver, who resisted, according to Yehuda Dahan, the district police chief. The man then stabbed a number of passengers before they managed to open the doors of the bus and escape.
As the assailant ran off, armed personnel from Israel’s prison service who happened to be in the vicinity chased and shot him. A member of the prison service team told reporters that they were on a routine trip to the courts when they noticed the bus in front of them zigzagging and then coming to a stop at a green traffic light. They realized something was happening, he said, as passengers began disembarking from the bus, screaming.
“First we fired in the air, but he didn’t stop,†the head of the prison security team, who was not identified, said to the Israeli news media, referring to the assailant. “Then we shot him in the legs,†he said, adding that the man did not say anything.
Images from the scene showed the assailant lying face down in the mud, his hands handcuffed behind him, the lower left part of his jeans soaked with blood.
Israel has been struggling to prevent attacks that security officials say are carried out by individuals rather than orchestrated by organizations. Yitzhak Aharonovitch, the Israeli minister of internal security, said the authorities were trying to determine whether the attacker had a work permit allowing him to cross into Israel from the West Bank.
The attack came during a charged political atmosphere in Israel, with elections scheduled for March 17 and with Israeli-Palestinian relations in a downward spiral since the breakdown of American-brokered peace talks last spring.
Diplomatic tensions have escalated in recent weeks as the Palestinian leadership moved to join the International Criminal Court in an effort to pursue war crimes cases against Israel. Israel responded this month by withholding more than $100 million in tax revenue it collects on behalf of the Palestinian Authority. As a result, the authority has been unable to pay full wages to its 150,000 employees.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and other members of the government have accused Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, of incitement to violence and failure to adequately condemn the attacks against Israelis.
In a statement after Wednesday’s attack, Naftali Bennett, a right-wing minister in the Israeli cabinet, said of Mr. Abbas, “The person responsible for the terrorist attack in Tel Aviv this morning is the same man we saw walking in the company of world leaders in Paris just last week,†after terrorist attacks there.
Mr. Bennett called on Israel to stop the flow of funds to Mr. Abbas, whom he described as a “terrorist.â€
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