Four Israelis dead in stabbing, car-ramming in Beersheba
A man wielding a knife stabbed several people and ran over another in southern Israel on Tuesday, the incident left four dead.
The unrest at a gas station and outside a shopping center in the southern city of Beersheba began shortly after 4:00 pm (1400 GMT), police and emergency medical responders said.
Hamas, the Palestinian group that controls the Gaza Strip, released a statement that did not claim the attack but blamed it on Israel’s treatments of Palestinians.
Speaking to radio station, group spokesman Hazem Qassem said the “operation is a response to the policy of ethnic displacement practiced by Israel against our Palestinian people inside the occupied territories.”
Stabbing and car-ramming attacks, often by lone Palestinian assailants, are common in Israel.
But its southern region, including Beersheba, have recently been spared such violence, with much of it instead concentrated in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem or the occupied West Bank.
Recent unrest in the south has involved clashes between Israel’s Bedouin community – part of Israel’s 20 percent Arab minority – and security forces.
There were no immediate details from police on any possible affiliations of the presumed attacker.
