Five people, including a police officer, were killed by a Palestinian gunman in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv on Tuesday.
According to the BBC, the gunman has been identified as a 26-year-old Palestinian man from Jenin village in the West Bank who had previously served time in an Israeli jail.
Footage of the attack, broadcast on Israeli television stations, showed the gunman dressed in black walking down a road in the suburb of Bnei Brak, shooting at people with a rifle and killing the driver of a passing car.
According to a paramedic on the scene, the gunman was shot dead by police.
The attack is the third of its kind in the space of a week.
Last Tuesday, an Arab man drove his car into a cyclist, killing him, before stabbing three others to death in the southern city of Beersheba. The man had previously served jail time for security crimes and had planned to join the Islamic State in Syria.
On Sunday, a pair of Arab gunmen killed two police officers during a shooting spree in the central city of Hadera. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack.
Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has called an emergency meeting of top security officials amid fears that further violent attacks may be imminent in the run-up to the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, tweeting that Israel ‘is facing a wave of murderous Arab terrorism’.
He added: ‘After a period of quiet, there is a violent outburst from those who are trying to destroy us, those who want to harm us at all costs, whose hatred of the Jews, to the State of Israel, drives them mad. Those who are willing to die as long as we do not live in peace.’
He said that Israeli security forces were the best in the world and were prepared to fight terror ‘with perseverance, stubbornness and an iron fist’.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has condemned the latest attack and cautioned against retaliatory attacks by ‘Jewish settlers’, according to the Palestinian News Agency.
No organisation has claimed responsibility for Tuesday’s shooting, but Palestinian militant group Hamas praised the shooter’s actions, saying: ‘We express our blessing to the Tel Aviv operation.’
[Image: Ted Eytan, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=91625487]