One dead, 32 wounded in suspected terror truck-ramming at bus stop north of Tel Aviv
Driver ‘neutralized’; medics say 8 people were trapped under truck that plowed into crowd at Glilot near intel, Mossad bases; many of the injured were elderly Israelis on day trip
A man was killed and 32 people were wounded in a suspected terror truck-ramming attack at a bus stop near Herzliya on Sunday morning — five in serious condition, seven moderately wounded, and 20 lightly hurt.
Police said that the driver who rammed his truck into people at a bus stop outside the IDF’s Glilot base in central Israel, north of Tel Aviv, was shot and “neutralized” by armed civilians in the area.
The victim in the attack was later named as Bezalel Carmi, 72, from Rishon Lezion.
Hebrew media outlets named the perpetrator Rami Nasrallah, an Arab Israeli driver from Qalansawe in central Israel. His body was sent to the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute for an autopsy to check if he suffered a medical condition that caused the accident, the reports said.
According to the police’s initial probe, a bus had stopped at the station outside the base to drop off passengers, and then a truck rammed into the stop, hitting the people there.
Many of the injured were senior citizens who had disembarked from the bus ahead of a day trip to a nearby museum to mark the national memorial day for those killed in the October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre and subsequent war.
Hamas put out a statement a short while after the incident, praising the “heroic ramming attack” that was carried out near “Mossad headquarters.”
The Glilot area near Herzliya is home to the Mossad headquarters, along with several IDF intelligence units, including the high-profile signals intelligence Unit 8200.
Without taking responsibility for the apparent attack, the terror group said that it was “a natural response to the crimes of the Zionist occupation against our Palestinian people in Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem, and its ongoing brutal massacres, especially in the northern Gaza Strip.”
The Magen David Adom emergency service said eight people were trapped under the truck when medics arrived at the bus stop, and others were lying or walking nearby.
Officers and ambulances rushed to the scene, where police cordoned off the area, as medics helped the injured and a helicopter hovered above.
Following the attack, Tel Aviv’s Ichilov Hospital said one of the victims of the suspected terror attack was in critical condition. A short while later, the hospital released a statement saying that doctors had pronounced Carmi dead. It was unclear whether he was the same victim who was critically injured.
Police were probing further details, including the motive of the attack.
The owner of the truck company where the driver worked told the Kan public broadcaster that he deviated from his set route and drove towards the area where the attack took place: “He shouldn’t have been there.”
But Nasrallah’s brother Muhammad told the Ynet news site that he believed the attack was “not terrorism,” claiming his brother suffered from an unspecified illness, and that the family was not linked “to these things.”
“This was a regular accident. He never did anything bad to anyone in his life,” he said.
זירת האירוע בגלילות >>> pic.twitter.com/z8yqwrjedS
— משטרת ישראל (@IL_police) October 27, 2024
In a separate incident in the West Bank on Sunday, the Israel Defense Forces said a Palestinian motorist who tried to carry out a ramming and stabbing attack against IDF troops near the West Bank town of Hizma was shot dead.
According to the IDF, the assailant accelerated his car toward troops of the Binyamin Regional Brigade’s 43rd Battalion, as they were operating near Hizma.
“The terrorist drew a knife… and tried to carry out a stabbing attack,” the IDF said, adding that the soldiers opened fire at the assailant, killing him.
Hebrew media named the perpetrator as Amudi Sami, an East Jerusalem resident of the Shuafat refugee camp.
There were no other injuries in the incident.
Police said the Route 437 highway in the area was blocked to traffic following the incident.
דוברות המשטרה:
לפני זמן קצר התקבל דיווח על רכב פלסטיני שניסה לדרוס חיילים בסמוך לכפר הפלסטיני חיזמה בכביש 437.
אין נפגעים באירוע, המחבל חוסל במקום. pic.twitter.com/yEpQZnX8b1
— מה חדש. What's new❓ (@Gloz111) October 27, 2024
The attacks on Sunday came as Israel marked the first anniversary on the Hebrew calendar of Hamas’s October 7 mass onslaught against southern Israel, the worst terror attack in Israel’s history, when 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage to Gaza.
Since then, 41 people, including Israeli security personnel, have been killed in a string of additional 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 previous week. 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.
Agencies contributed to this report.