Jerusalem: A Palestinian man rammed a car into pedestrians near a street market in Jerusalem, injuring five people before he was shot and killed, Israeli police said in a statement.
The incident took place on Monday on a busy street next to Jerusalem’s Mahane Yehuda Market, a crowded souk in the city centre, reports Xinhua news agency.
The suspect, a 39-year-old Palestinian man from the town of Beit Safafa in Jerusalem, was “neutralised” and killed at the scene, according to the statement.
CCTV footage shows that the driver deliberately crashed his car into the crowd, and “a preliminary examination has ruled out any mechanical fault in the vehicle”, Israeli police said.
Israel’s rescue service Magen David Adom said in a statement that a 70-year-old man sustained serious wounds in the attack.
At a ceremony to mark Israel’s Memorial Day for fallen soldiers, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the attack was “another attempt to murder Israeli citizens”.
“These terrorist attacks come with the expectation that they will overcome us and will uproot us from here, and if they could, they would murder us all. But they will not overcome us; we will overcome them.”
Following the attack, Israel is on heightened alert ahead of Memorial Day, which commemorates soldiers and civilians who have been killed in conflict and attacks since 1860, the BBC reported.
The occasion leads into Independence Day on Tuesday night and Wednesday. The day is celebrated with patriotic events, with this year marking Israel’s 75th anniversary.
Monday’s attack comes amid a surge in Israeli-Palestinian violence this year.
It came hours after Israeli troops shot and killed a 20-year-old Palestinian man in the Aqbat Jaber refugee camp in the West Bank during an arrest raid.
Since the start of this year, more than 90 Palestinians — militants and civilians — have been killed by Israeli forces.
Eighteen Israelis, a Ukrainian and an Italian — all civilians, except for an Israeli paramilitary police officer — have been also killed in attacks by (or suspected to have been carried out by) Palestinians and, in one case, an Israeli Arab.
(Except for the headline, the story has not been edited by Siasat staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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