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One person was killed and at least 13 were injured in a series of suspected car-rammings in the city of Ra’anana in central Israel on Monday, which police described as a “terror attack”.
A police spokesperson said a Palestinian man from the city of Hebron in the occupied West Bank was “believed to have stolen multiple vehicles and used them to run over a number of civilians” in an Israeli city about 20km north of Tel Aviv.
He has been arrested, along with a second man whom police described as his relative. The case will be investigated by local police in co-operation with the Shin Bet internal security agency.
“It is currently believed to be a multi-stage event in which the suspects switched between three vehicles,” the police said.
Israel’s Magen David Adom paramedic service treated 18 casualties, one of whom was in a critical condition and two who were in a “serious condition with head and limb injuries”. It said at least one person had suffered stabbing injuries.
Israeli media subsequently reported that a woman in her 70s had died from her wounds, citing the Meir Hospital in the nearby city of Kfar Saba. The hospital did not respond to requests for comment.
The attack took place amid heightened tensions over Israel’s three-month long war against Hamas in Gaza. Hamas said the suspected rammings were a “natural response to the occupation’s massacres and its continued aggression against our Palestinian people” but stopped short of claiming responsibility.
The war, which began when the Palestinian militant group stormed into Israel from Gaza last year, is already the bloodiest round of fighting in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since the war that accompanied the Jewish state’s founding in 1948.
Hamas militants killed around 1,200 people and took a further 240 hostage during the October 7 attack, according to Israeli officials.
Israel’s retaliatory assault on Gaza has killed more than 24,000 people, according to Palestinian officials, as well as displacing 1.9mn of the territory’s 2.3mn inhabitants and rendering huge swaths of the territory uninhabitable.
On Monday, the heads of three UN agencies said a “fundamental step change” in the flow of humanitarian aid was “urgently needed”, warning that there was a growing risk of famine in Gaza.
“Without the ability to produce or import food, the entire population of Gaza relies on aid to survive,” the agencies said, warning that the quantities of aid being delivered “fall far short of what is needed to prevent a deadly combination of hunger, malnutrition and disease”.
