A car-ramming and stabbing terror attack on Monday in the city of Ra’anana, 20 kilometers north of Tel Aviv, left a 79-year-old woman dead and 17 others, including seven children and teenagers, injured.
The attack appears to have been coordinated and came a day after the war in Gaza reached its 100-day mark. The alleged terrorists—two West Bank Palestinians—stabbed passersby and ran over pedestrians with multiple stolen vehicles.
Hamas lauded the terrorists as “heroes of the Palestinian people,” and claimed the attack came in response to Israel’s campaign in the Gaza Strip.
The pair, 44-year-old Muhammad Zaidat and his 25-year-old nephew Ahmed Zaidat, are both native to the Palestinian town of Bani Na’im, not far from the city of Hebron, and were working in Israel illegally, according to police.
Reports from Israeli police and media say the rampage started in the early afternoon as students were being dismissed from class. One of the suspects attacked a woman behind the wheel of a black jeep, and forcibly removed her from the vehicle before deliberately driving it into three pedestrians in the vicinity.
After losing control of the car, the terrorist went on to steal a second vehicle which he then used to target additional victims.
“It all happened in a second,” one witness, Eden Arzi, told Israel’s Army Radio.
“We heard the noise of a crash, like a car bumping into another car,” she said. “We saw the driver go to stab a woman and she ran away, and [the driver] went and stabbed a 60-year-old man while there were a bunch of screams in the background, until he fell on the ground.”
At another location across the city, around the same time, the second terrorist knifed a woman driving a white car, took control of the vehicle, and struck multiple victims before he lost control and slammed it into a pole. He then fled on foot before being apprehended by security forces.
Another onlooker told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that she “saw someone stab three people near the mall, steal a car, and run over people with it.”
Of the 17 people injured, three, one of whom is a 16-year-old boy, are in serious condition while the remaining 14, including six children, suffered less severe injuries.
The attacks have been described by an Israeli spokesman as a “multi-staged event.” Both terrorists believed to have been involved in the attack are in police custody.
Following the attacks, Israeli Defense Forces conducted daytime raids on a target in the West Bank Palestinian city of Dura, near Hebron, possibly in search of additional suspects. According to the Palestinian health ministry, the raid resulted in the death of a 22-year-old while 10 others were injured.
