Five Killed in Two Attacks in Tel Aviv and the West Bank

At least one attacker, reported to be a Palestinian, shot into a minivan full of people as well as another auto near a traffic junction, then rammed his vehicle into several other cars and bystanders, according to reports. However, he then stabbed several other people in the building, killing 51-year-old Reuven Aviram and 32-year-old Aharon Yesiav and wounding two others.

Amnesty global has also documented a pattern of unlawful killings, including extrajudicial executions, by Israeli forces against Palestinian civilians and a series of attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinian civilians and homes over the past two months.

The stabber was identified as a 36-year-old father of five from the West Bank village of Dura, near Hebron, who worked at a restaurant near the scene of the attack.

Israelis and Palestinians buried their dead on Friday (Nov 20) after one of the deadliest days in almost eight weeks of lone wolf violence that is challenging Israeli security thinking.

Ezra Schwartz, 18, of Sharon, Mass., was a gap-year student attending Yeshivat Ashreinu in Beit Shemesh.

Schwartz was from the Boston suburb of Sharon and went to high school in Brookline, Massachusetts, graduating this year.

On Tuesday, Israel banned the radical wing of the country’s main Islamist organisation, accusing it of instigating violence at a sensitive Jerusalem holy site that preceded the wave of unrest. “The mourning is the same mourning in Tel Aviv, Paris and the Gush Etzion bloc, and in the Sinai (Peninsula)”, Rivlin said, in a statement issued by his office. “Radical Islam seeks to destroy us”, he said.

Three Israelis, an American and a Palestinian (who may or may not have been the attacker) were all killed in the deadliest day since an 1 October upsurge in violence began.

Seventeen Israelis have died in recent weeks in lone-wolf stabbing, shooting and vehicular attacks.

“The army will continue to take all legal steps available to it against the attackers and their accomplices in order to ensure security for the residents of the State of Israel”, the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit said after that raid. Israeli cellular carriers transmit 3G, but Palestinian networks have been confined to the slower 2G networks.

The building where the attack occurred, known as the Panorama building in southern Tel Aviv, hosts a variety of shops and offices.

Details of the West Bank attack were still emerging. At least 82 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire, 52 of them said by Israel to be attackers, the remainder killed in clashes with Israeli troops. “Given the clear evidence captured on videotape of the excessive use of force, it is hard to see how this sentence would promote full accountability for the actions of the police officer in this case”.