Attack in Tel Aviv: one dead, five injured

UPDATE DAY

A man in his thirties was killed and five others were injured in an attack in central Tel Aviv on Friday evening, according to an updated report from Israeli relief.

Joined by AFP, the police spoke of a “terrorist attack against civilians, a ramming car attack”.

The Magen David Adom (MDA), Israel's equivalent of the Red Cross, said it had pronounced dead a man in his 30s and evacuated five wounded to hospitals in the Tel Aviv area after the attack on rue Kaufmann, the main artery that runs along the beach.

Three were moderately injured, including a 17-year-old girl, and two slightly, according to this source.

“All the victims are tourists,” the MDA said in a statement, without further details.

The attack came on a Shabbat night and during Passover week, amid an upsurge in violence in recent days in the Middle East.

Earlier Friday, two 16-year-old British-Israeli sisters and 20, from the Israeli settlement of Efrat, were killed and their mother seriously injured in a Palestinian attack in the West Bank, Palestinian territory occupied by Israel since 1967.

The two attacks on Friday come after Israeli strikes in Gaza and Lebanon against positions of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, in response to the firing of dozens of rockets against its territory.

This outbreak of fever follows the brutal irruption of Israeli forces and violence on Wednesday at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, Islam's third holiest site. International condemnations have multiplied and Hamas, in power in the Gaza Strip, has denounced an “unprecedented crime” by Israel, in the middle of Ramadan.