Palestinian Stabs Up to a Dozen Israelis in Rush-Hour Attack in Tel Aviv - New York Times

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JERUSALEM — A Palestinian man stabbed and wounded up to 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 being treated in a hospital and questioned, the police 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.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel blamed the Palestinian leadership for creating an atmosphere that led to Wednesday’s attack, saying in a statement that it was “the direct result of the poisonous incitement being disseminated by the Palestinian Authority against the Jews and their state.”

“This same terrorism is trying to attack us in Paris, Brussels and everywhere,” he continued.

The assailant, identified by the police as Hamza Muhammad Hassan Matrouk, 23, boarded a bus in Tel Aviv around 7:30 a.m. and traveled several stops as more passengers boarded. He first attacked the driver, who resisted, said 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 stopping 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.

The police said that Mr. Matrouk was a resident of a refugee camp in Tulkarm and had entered Israel illegally on Wednesday morning to carry out the attack.

The police said that during an interrogation, Mr. Matrouk said he was motivated by the recent fighting in Gaza, tensions over a contested holy site in Jerusalem, and radical Islamic broadcasts that spoke of “reaching paradise.”

“He said he decided to achieve that by carrying out an attack,” a police spokesman said.

A passenger who was lightly wounded in the attack, Liel Suissa, 14, said he was on his way to school “when suddenly the terrorist showed up and started stabbing people.”

“We all moved towards the back. The driver pressed the brakes as the terrorist was heading close to us,” he told the Israeli news media.

“I elbowed the window, and it broke so we could get out,” he said, adding, “When we got out, he chased us with the knife in his hand. I ran and hid behind cars and then security personnel ran after him.”

Israel has been struggling to prevent attacks that security officials say are carried out by individuals rather than orchestrated by organizations.

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.

Israel condemned the formation of a new Palestinian government supported both by the more moderate West Bank leadership, dominated by President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement, and the militant group Hamas that controls Gaza.

The abductions and killings of Israeli and Palestinian teenagers were followed by 50 days of fighting that killed nearly 2,200 people in Gaza and more than 70 on the Israeli side.

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.

Mr. Netanyahu on Wednesday said that Hamas, Mr. Abbas’s “partners in a unity government, hastened to commend this attack.” Referring to Mr. Abbas by his popular name, Mr. Netanyahu added, “Abu Mazen is responsible for both the incitement and the dangerous move at the I.C.C. in The Hague.”

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 marching 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.”

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