Eight people were still in hospital on Wednesday, hours after a Palestinian man from the West Bank city of Tulkarem stabbed commuters on a Tel Aviv bus and passersby in the street during rush hour, including three who were left in serious condition.
Seventeen people were injured overall, a police spokesman said, labeling the incident a terror attack.
The attack occurred at about 7:30 a.m. on a No. 40 bus heading north through the city from Bat Yam. It took place at the Maariv Bridge, which spans a main artery in the city and was packed with rush hour traffic at the time.
The attacker was identified as Hamza Matrouk, 23. He was shot after a short chase, during which he continued to stab people on the street, and taken into police custody.
Matrouk was in Israel illegally. In an initial interrogation, Matrouk claimed that the terror attack was motivated by the Israel-Hamas war last summer, and recent tensions surrounding the Temple Mount.
A video uploaded to the internet shortly after the attack appears to show part of Wednesday’s stabbing. A number of people can be seen fleeing down the street when, from the left side of the screen, the attacker can be discerned racing after a woman in a blue jacket, whom he stabs in the back before running off down the street.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blamed incitement against Israel by the Palestinian Authority, and its head Mahmoud Abbas, for the attack.
The terrorist attack in Tel Aviv is the direct result of the poisonous incitement being disseminated by the Palestinian Authority against the Jews and their state,” Netanyahu said.
“This same terrorism is trying to attack us in Paris, Brussels and everywhere. It is Hamas – Abbas’s partners in a unity government – that hastened to commend this attack. This is the same Hamas that announced it will sue Israel at the International Criminal Court in the Hague. Abbas is responsible for both the incitement and the dangerous move at the ICC in the Hague,” he said.
Hamas praised the attack as heroic. Izzat al-Rishq, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, called the attack “heroic and brave,” adding that it is “the natural response to the crimes of the occupation and its terror against our people.”
Caricatures praising the attack began to emerge on Hamas-affiliated news websites.
Safa News Agency published an image of a knife painted in the colors of the Palestinian flag dripping blood and a tarnished Israeli flag in the background, with the caption “Good morning Palestine.”
Another cartoon depicted the perpetrator holding a bloodied knife, gloating over the stabbing of ten Israelis, with a sign reading “occupied Tel Aviv” in the background.