Israeli security forces hunted down and killed a Palestinian man early on Friday, hours after he opened fire in a crowded bar in central Tel Aviv, killing two people and wounding more than 10 others in an attack that caused scenes of mass panic in the city.
Police closed roads and ordered public transport to be shut down during the search for the man, who was later found hiding near a mosque in Jaffa, south of Tel Aviv, Israel's Shin Bet security agency said.
The attacker was killed during an exchange of fire, Shin Bet said.
Israeli public radio identified the alleged him as a man in his late 20s from Jenin refugee camp in the northern part of the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
“We succeeded this morning, in operational and intelligence co-operation, in closing a circle and eliminating the terrorist by exchange of fire,” police commissioner Maj Gen Yaakov Shabtai said.
The attacker entered a pub on a crowded main street of Tel Aviv late on Thursday and began shooting, killing two people and wounding more than 10 others, three of them seriously, before fleeing.
Tel Aviv's Ichilov Hospital, which was treating eight of the wounded, said on Friday morning that one of the victims was “in critical condition, with an immediate risk to his life”.
The bar attack was the latest in a string of deadly street assaults that have left 13 dead and shaken Israel. A shooting last week in Bnei Brak city, near Tel Aviv, left five civilians dead.
Three fighters from Islamic Jihad, an armed Palestinian movement, were killed in exchanges of fire linked to these raids.
During the last week of March, Israeli forces killed six Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.
