The Palestinian driver of a construction vehicle flipped over an Israeli police car and rammed an empty bus here on Thursday, injuring two police officers before he was shot dead, police said.
Police later identified the assailant as a Palestinian resident of Beit Hanina, a predominantly Arab neighborhood in northeast Jerusalem. Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said the man, Mari al-Radeideh, 26, was married and the father of one child.
Jerusalem’s deputy police commander, Niso Shahar, told reporters: “We have no doubt that it is a terror attack.”
The driver was shot by other police officers who arrived at the scene and at least one civilian, a taxi driver, witnesses said.
“I saw the police car flying in the air,” Oz Ma’atabi, the taxi driver, told Israel Radio. “He lifted it in the air, he rolled it over twice and dragged it in the direction of a bus.”
“I shot at him with my gun. There was a policeman behind me who was a little in shock. With four bullets, I finished him. I used my personal weapon and the policeman next to me also shot,” Mr. Ma’atabi said.
The police and ambulance services said the driver had died of his wounds in hospital. News photographs taken shortly after the incident showed him lying in a pool of blood on the ground. The windows of the driver’s cabin were shattered on three sides. A reporter counted at least six bullet holes in one side of the vehicle alone.
The incident took place at a busy intersection near the Malha shopping center in south Jerusalem. No group immediately took responsibility for the attack, but some Palestinians linked it to Israel’s demolition of Palestinian homes in east Jerusalem and the recent Israeli offensive in Gaza.
Mushir al-Masri, a senior official of Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza, said in a statement, “The operation in Jerusalem was a natural response to aggression against our people.”
The violence recalled two episodes last July in which Palestinians driving construction vehicles in central Jerusalem were shot dead after plowing their vehicles into traffic and pedestrians. Three Israelis were killed in the first of those attacks.
In September, a car owned by a Palestinian rammed into Israeli soldiers and civilians just outside the Old City in Jerusalem, injuring several people before a soldier shot the driver dead.
In Gaza, Israeli airstrikes killed at least four Islamic Jihad militants late Wednesday and early Thursday, and Palestinians fired three more rockets at southern Israel.
The strikes came after the rocket firings intensified in recent days and pointed to rising tension after several weeks of relative calm. Though the latest rockets fell in open areas and caused no casualties or damage, rockets launched last weekend struck an empty school in the coastal city of Ashkelon and damaged two houses in the Israeli border town of Sderot.
An Israeli missile struck a car carrying a group of Islamic Jihad militants in northern Gaza on Wednesday night, the group and the Israeli military said. The military named the primary target as Khaled Shalan and described him as a senior Islamic Jihad commander responsible for firing longer-range rockets that include Ashkelon as a target. Islamic Jihad confirmed in a statement that Mr. Shalan, a “field commander,” had been killed and that his deputy was seriously wounded.
Some reports from Gaza said that two of the militants in the car were killed.
Early Thursday, Israeli planes carried out another strike against a group of gunmen close to the border with Israel, killing three. The military said the gunmen had fired an anti-tank missile at forces patrolling on the Israeli side of the border, prompting the second air strike. Islamic Jihad described the strike as a “crime.”
Israel and Hamas, the Islamic group that rules Gaza, declared separate cease-fires in mid-January after a punishing 22-day Israeli offensive there. But Egyptian-brokered talks for a mutual long-term truce appear to be in suspension, with Israel demanding that Hamas must first release an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit who was captured in 2006.
An Islamic Jihad leader in Gaza, Khader Habib, ruled out an imminent cease-fire, saying “the escalation against the Palestinian fighters makes any talk about a lull a sort of vanity.”
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