An Italian tourist was killed and seven other people wounded in a suspected car ramming attack in Tel Aviv.
he 30-year-old Italian man was among a group of Italian and British citizens who were hit by a car near a beach late on Friday.
Israel’s rescue service said a 74-year-old man and a 17-year-old girl were receiving medical treatment for mild to moderate injuries.
Police said they shot and killed the driver of the car and identified him as a 45-year-old Palestinian citizen of Israel from the village of Kafr Qassem.
A video circulating on social media showed the car hurtling along a sidewalk for several hundred metres before crashing out of control.
Italian premier Giorgia Meloni’s office expressed “closeness to the family of the victim” and “solidarity with the Israel for the vile attack”. She identified the man killed as Alessandro Parini from Rome.
In a separate incident, two British-Israeli women were shot to death near a settlement in the occupied West Bank.
The two women in their 20s, who were sisters, were killed while their 45-year-old was seriously wounded.
The family lived in the Efrat settlement, near the Palestinian city of Bethlehem, said Oded Revivi, the settlement’s mayor.
The girls’ father was driving in a car behind his wife and daughters and witnessed the attack.
Medics said they dragged the unconscious women from the smashed car, which appeared to have been pushed off the road.
No groups claimed responsibility for either attack. But the Hamas militant group that rules Gaza praised both incidents as retaliation for Israeli raids earlier this week on the Al-Aqsa mosque — the third-holiest site in Islam.
On Tuesday, police arrested and beat hundreds of Palestinians there, who responded by hurling rocks and firecrackers at officers.
The attack came against the backdrop of heightened tensions after Israeli air strikes on Palestinian militant targets in both Lebanon and Gaza, as well as a shooting attack in the occupied West Bank that killed two people.
That followed days of violence and unrest in Jerusalem’s most sensitive holy site, the compound of the Al-Aqsa mosque in the Old City.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he was calling up all reserve forces in Israel’s border police “to confront the terror attacks”.
The Hamas militant group that rules Gaza praised the attack in Tel Aviv as a response to Israel’s “crimes against Al-Aqsa Mosque and worshippers”.
Even as quiet returned to Israel’s northern and southern borders, the early morning Israeli strikes on Lebanon — which analysts described as the most serious border violence since Israel’s 2006 war with Lebanon’s Hezbollah militants — threatened to push the confrontation into a new phase.
Israeli strikes came in retaliation for a major barrage of rockets from Lebanon the day before, after Israeli police raids at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem spiralled into unrest and sparked outrage across the Arab world.
Although the Israeli military was quick to emphasise that its warplanes struck sites belonging to only Palestinian militant groups, the barrage risks drawing in Israel’s bitter foe Hezbollah, which holds sway over much of southern Lebanon and has in the past portrayed itself as a defender of the Palestinians and the contested city of Jerusalem.
Israeli missiles had earlier struck an open field in the southern Lebanese town of Qalili, near the Palestinian refugee camp of Rashidiyeh, killing sheep and inflicting minor injuries on residents.