Man lightly hurt in Bnei Brak terror ramming; Arab Israeli driver arrested

Officers arrest suspected driver in parking lot after pursuit; police said to increasingly suspect earlier stabbing in Karmiel was also terror attack

By ToI Staff 10 December 2024, 11:31 pm Edit

A man was lightly injured Tuesday evening in a terror car-ramming attack, the Israel Police said.

Security camera footage published by the Ynet news site showed a car speeding up and then apparently hitting the 21-year-old victim off-screen.

The injured man was in good condition and was taken to Mayanei HaYeshua Medical Center in the city, the Magen David Adom ambulance service said in a statement.

Police said they arrested the suspected driver in a nearby underground parking lot after a pursuit by officers.

Hebrew media outlets said the suspect was from the Arab Israeli town of Zemer.

Police said the incident is under investigation, and that they increased their deployment in the area.

Separately, police were increasingly suspecting that an incident earlier Tuesday in which a man stabbed a police officer and a security guard in the northern city of Karmiel was a terror attack, according to several Hebrew media reports.

The incident had its roots on Saturday, when the assailant, from the Arab town of Nahf, was briefly arrested after a soldier complained that he had tried to reach for her firearm. In his questioning, the man said he had merely tried to move the weapon out of his way, not grab it.

On Tuesday, the same man arrived at the police station in Karmiel and was stopped at the entrance after giving insufficient answers as to why he was entering, saying he wanted to “speak with the cops,” according to the Ynet news site.

He then brandished out a knife and attacked the cop — who didn’t require hospitalization — and the guard, who was seriously injured.

Police initially said the motive was criminal, but later said all possibilities, including terror, were being looked into.

Tuesday’s incidents came only days after an Israeli soldier was seriously wounded in the southern West Bank, when an assailant rammed his vehicle into the reservist at a junction outside the Al Fawwar refugee camp near Hebron, before fleeing the scene.

Later in the evening, the suspected rammer turned himself in to security forces, the IDF said.

Since Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre, 41 people, including Israeli security personnel, have been killed in terror attacks in Israel and the West Bank. Another six members of the security forces were killed in clashes with terror operatives in the West Bank.

In mid-October, a policeman was killed and four people wounded when a terrorist opened fire along the Route 4 highway north of the coastal city of Ashdod, and a man was killed in a terror-stabbing rampage in Hadera the week before. Seven people were killed and at least eight wounded in a shooting and stabbing attack in Jaffa on October 1, just minutes before Iran launched a massive ballistic missile attack on Israel.

A car-ramming incident at a bus stop outside the IDF’s Glilot base that killed a 72-year-old civilian and wounded 35 others was also likely a terror attack, according to police.

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