Twelve casualties after Tel Aviv stabbing spree
AFTER A lull of a few weeks, terror attacks resumed in Israel on Wednesday morning when a Palestinian from the West Bank town of Tulkarm boarded a bus in central Tel Aviv and began stabbing the driver and passengers. Eleven commuters and the driver were wounded, four of them in a severe condition.
A squad of security personnel of the police service’s elite Nahshon unit, who were driving behind the bus, overcame the attacker, shooting him in his leg and arresting him. Tel Aviv police commander, Benzy Sau, commended the driver, 55-year-old Herzl Bitton, who fought with the attacker and was stabbed twice in the chest, while most of the passengers managed to escape the bus unscathed.
The attacker, Hamza Matruch (22) told police after being arrested that he had wanted to “martyr himself” avenging Israel’s actions in Gaza and on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. While the
Blood on the road after the attack Shin Bet believe that Matruch acted alone, Hamas in Gaza was quick to congratulate him, calling the stabbings “a heroic and brave deed” and publishing cartoons of daggers on its websites.
Israeli politicians were quick to blame the Palestinian Authority for its responsibility, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying that the attack was “a direct result of the poisonous incitement being spread in the Palestinian Authority against the Jews and their state.”
Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman blamed Israeli-Arab MKs and the leadership of Hamas as well.