One man was killed and more than a dozen people injured by a car that drove into a light-rail station and onto the sidewalk in Jerusalem.
The Nov. 5 incident — the second attack of its kind in two weeks — was being called a terror attack.
Later in the day, a van with Palestinian Authority license plates drove into a group of Israeli soldiers in Gush Etzion in the West Bank, injuring three, one of them critically. The driver escaped.
In Jerusalem, two of the injured were sent to Jerusalem hospitals in critical condition. The dead man was identified as Israel Border Police officer Jidan Assad, 38, from the Druze village of Beit Jaan.
“It is a difficult day for Jerusalem,” the city’s mayor, Nir Barkat, said at the scene.
The driver, identified as Ibrahim Akkari, a Hamas activist from eastern Jerusalem, left his car carrying a metal bar and began attacking police, who shot and killed him.
Secretary of State John Kerry deplored the attack at an appearance in Washington with Jordan’s foreign minister.
“That is not just a terrorist act and an atrocity, but it only makes matters worse,” Kerry said. “It only raises tensions.”
Akkari steered his car into a crowd of people waiting at a bus stop and then crashed into the light-rail station, both on the border between western and eastern Jerusalem.
In a news conference at the scene about an hour after the midday attack, Israel’s minister of internal security, Yitzhak Aharonovich, said he recommended to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the homes of such attackers be destroyed.
A Hamas spokesman reportedly praised the incident, calling it an act of revenge “for Al-Aksa and for the blood of those who guard Al-Aksa.”
The Al-Aksa mosque on the Temple Mount has been the scene of almost daily rioting and unrest in recent weeks.
Hours after the attack, Netanyahu said it was the “direct consequence of Abbas’ incitement and that of his Hamas partners.” He made the remark at the official state memorial for slain Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on Mount Herzl.
On Oct. 22, a Palestinian driver plowed into a crowd of people at a light-rail station on Ammunition Hill in northern Jerusalem, killing a 3-month-old and a woman from Ecuador. — jta