At least four people have died and two others have been injured, this Tuesday in a multiple attack at the hands of an Arab attacker in a shopping center in Beersheva, in southern Israel. The assailant, a Bedouin with Israeli nationality whom the police described as affiliated with jihadism, was shot dead, according to a spokesman for the security forces. Hebrew press. This is one of the most serious attacks recorded in Israel since the Second Intifada (2000-2005).
The deceased are three women and one man, aged between 35 and 60 years, according to information from the Red Star of David emergency health services. The attacker was identified as Mohamed Alab Ahmed, a resident of the village of Hura (located 15 kilometers from Beersheva)who had been convicted and imprisoned in 2015 for having publicly declared himself a supporter of the Islamic State (ISIS) in classes at an institute where he worked as a teacher.
Witnesses of the attack recounted in the digital pages of the Hebrew press that the assailant stabbed a woman at a gas station near the mall and then seized a vehicle. Along the way, he hit a bicyclist before stopping at the shopping complex to stab other people. He was shot dead by an armed bus driver shortly before the arrival of security forces.
This has been the third recorded attack since last Saturday, when a Palestinian youth stabbed an Israeli who was playing sports on a Jerusalem street located on the divide between the Western, or Jewish, and Eastern, or Arab sectors. On Sunday, a policeman was slightly injured in a knife attack in East Jerusalem. The chain of stabbings, which evokes the one recorded in the Intifada of the Knives (2015-2016), occurs on the eve of the start of Ramadan, which this year coincides with April.
No group has so far claimed responsibility for the attack. A spokesman for the Islamist movement Hamas praised from Gaza the “heroic act of Beersheva against the occupation”. The tension unleashed in 2021 during the Muslim holy month in Jerusalem led to a wave of serious clashes and an armed conflict in the Gaza Strip.
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Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has ordered security forces to be placed on high alert throughout the country following the Beersheva attack. “We will respond with forceful action to the terrorists, and we will persecute and arrest those who support them,” warned the head of the Government in an official statement. Not since 2017, when a Palestinian ran over dozens of soldiers with his truck, killing four of them in a Jerusalem park, has there been such a deadly attack on Israeli-held territory.
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