Israeli police say Tel Aviv explosion was a 'terror attack'

Hamas's military wing claimed responsibility

Israeli security and emergency personnel at the site of an explosion in Tel Aviv on August 18, 2024. AFP

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Israeli police on Monday said that an explosion the night before in Tel Aviv was a “terror attack” that wounded one person. Hamas's military wing, Ezzedine Al Qassam Brigades, claimed responsibility for the attack – the first of its kind in years.

Police and the Shin Bet security agency said the blast in Tel Aviv on Sunday night was a “terror attack involving the explosion of a powerful device”. A 50-year-old man was killed – reported by Israeli media as being the attacker – and one person was injured when the explosion happened on the city's Lechi Road.

“As a result of the explosion, a passer-by was moderately injured,” the authorities said, adding that the person was receiving medical treatment. No information about the attacker was released by authorities, but Israeli outlet Kan reported that the man was believed to be from the occupied West Bank.

“The scene here speaks for itself, it is a powerful charge that could have caused significant damage. We are in a kind of miracle that the incident did not end in dozens of deaths,” Haim Bobalil, police commander of the Ayalon area of Tel Aviv, said.

Ezzedine Al Qassam Brigades claimed responsibility in a statement on Telegram, saying that such attacks would continue as long as “the occupation's massacres, the displacement of civilians, and the continuation of the policy of assassinations continues”.

The authorities added that security measures in crowded areas had been raised “to ensure the safety and security of the public”.

Such attacks are extremely rare in Israel and it comes in the backdrop of the war in Gaza and violent raids in the occupied West Bank.

The UN on Monday said more than 280 aid workers had been killed in Gaza since the start of the war in Gaza, warning of unacceptable levels of violence.

The UN said most of the deaths were recorded in the first three months of the war, and were caused by air strikes.

“The normalisation of violence against aid workers and the lack of accountability are unacceptable, unconscionable and enormously harmful for aid operations everywhere,” Joyce Msuya, acting director of the UN's Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), said on World Humanitarian Day.

“We reiterate our demand that people in power act to end violations against civilians and the impunity with which these heinous attacks are committed,” she added.

A 32-year-old former Palestinian detainee from Tulkarem in the West Bank was arrested at dawn on Monday, when passing through the Al Hamra military checkpoint near Ariha [Jericho], Wafa news agency reported.

Five other men in Bethlehem were also arrested on Monday morning.

Israel carried out raids overnight in several villages near Tulkarem, searching homes and interrogating their residents, blocking most of the roads. Mosques were opened to receive people who had been stranded and unable to return to their homes because of the closure of the Jabara bridge, Wafa added.

In Nablus, a woman was injured bullet shrapnel in her back during the Israeli army's storming of the West Bank's largest refugee camp, Balata. Israeli forces also raided the Old City of Nablus, where the Lions' Den militant group is based, posting snipers on rooftops, witnesses told Wafa.

Israel's incursions and arrests in the West Bank have increased in October, with at least 10,000 Palestinians detained since the war began when Hamas launched an attack that killed about 1,200 people. Since then, more than 40,100 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza with at least 92,600 others injured and thousands more under rubble, the Gaza Ministry of Health said on Sunday.

An attack on an Israeli settlement in the West Bank on Sunday killed an Israeli man, a hospital said.

“After several attempts to save his life, doctors had to declare the death of a man who was fatally wounded in an attack in Samaria [occupied West Bank],” the Beilinson Hospital said. Local officials identified the victim as a resident of the settlement which is close to the village of Jit which had been stormed by about 100 settlers on Thursday.