Israel police says Tel Aviv gunman killed in police shootout

Israeli police found and killed a man they say fatally shot two people and wounded eight others last week outside a Tel Aviv pub, a police spokesman said Friday.

Nashaat Milhem was shot and killed on Friday night during a shootout with Israeli officers in his hometown of Arara, situated in the Triangle region of central Israel. When he stepped out and intuitively tried to escape.

The Israeli forces, from an elite police unit, had sought to capture Milhem alive, but he had opened fire with the machine gun he used in the Tel Aviv attack, Channel 2 reported.

Gilad Erdan, Israel’s minister for public security, announced the “elimination of the terrorist” in a statement on Friday.

The father condemned the killing and called on his son to turn himself in.

An Arab Israeli gunman who killed three Israelis in Tel Aviv was tracked down to his hiding place yesterday after sniffer dogs discovered his unburied faeces near his make-shift hideout.

The suspect was holed up in a building in his home town of Ar’ara, and shot dead in the fire fight with special commandos, police spokeswoman Luba Samri said.

Israel was already on high alert amid a wave of attacks on Israelis by Palestinians and some Israeli Arabs which have killed 22 Israelis since the beginning of October. At the time, police said they were searching for weapons and claimed the shooting was in self-defense. Moreover, by applauding Milhem, they are also making clear they think cosmopolitan Tel Aviv is just as much of an “illegitimate and illegal Jewish “settlement” as the most remote hilltop community in the West Bank inhabited by right-wing extremists”.

Abu Toameh was the first to tweet in English about Melhem’s initially becoming number 150 on the PA Health Ministry’s regular updates of the number and identity of Palestinians killed by Israeli security forces during the current surge in violence.

“Let all who wish to murder Israelis know that sooner or later we will reach them, inside the borders of the nation and outside of them”, said Netanyahu.

Milhem, 31, had previously spent four years in prison for charges related to a confrontation with an Israeli soldier, according to his former lawyer, who also described Milhem as mentally unstable. The rest were killed in clashes with troops.