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Two Palestinians kill woman, injure 17 in coordinated Israel car-rammings: cops
Two Palestinians launched a coordinated pair of car-rammings Monday in an Israeli city popular with Americans — killing an elderly woman and injuring 17 others.
The two suspects were arrested after the terror attacks in Raanana north of Tel Aviv, violence that left at least seven children and teenagers among the injured.
The suspects were identified as Ahmed Zidat, 25, and Mahmoud Zidat, 44, both residents of the southern West Bank town of Bani Naim who were blacklisted from Israel after illegally entering multiple times, the Times of Israel reported.
The car-rammings occurred just as students were being dismissed from schools, officials noted.
“[The suspects] went out together and in parallel, to two different locations, took two cars and launched a series of rammings,” central district Police Chief Avi Biton told reporters.
Biton noted that both men were relatives and had been illegally working in Israel’s industrial zone. The pair have been taken in to be interrogated by Shin Bet, Israel’s equivalent of the FBI.
Police added that at least one of the cars used in the attacks had been stolen.
No terror group has claimed responsibility for the attack.
But Hamas later said in a statement that the bloodshed was “a natural response to the occupation’s massacres and its continued aggression against our Palestinian people,” CNN reported.
The dead woman was identified by the Times of Israel as 79-year-old Raanana resident Edna Bluestein.
“A wounded woman who arrived in a critical condition after having been hit by a vehicle has died of her injuries despite our efforts to save her,” Meir hospital near Raanana said in a statement.
Magen David Adom officials said the injured included at least two people in serious condition: a 34-year-old man and a 16-year-old boy.
Nine others were listed in moderated condition, and six more sustained minor injuries, officials said.
Witnesses claimed that along with the car-ramming, the two suspects carried out a stabbing spree.
“We heard the noise of a crash, like a car bumping into another car,” Eden Arzi told Israel’s Army Radio. “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.”
The attack is only the latest violent incident to break out in and around the West Bank as the number of cases have soared following the Palestinian terror group Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre in Israel and Israel’s ensuing war on Gaza.
The occupied territory has become a hotbed as Palestinian protesters have clashed with police, who have been accused of being all too eager to use their firearms to shut down dissent.
Last week, Israeli police fired at a pair of suspected terrorists who allegedly rammed their car into a West Bank checkpoint, with bullets fatally striking a young Palestinian girl in an adjacent vehicle.
The Hamas-run Palestinian Authority’s health ministry estimates that about 300 Palestinians have been killed since the demonstrations began.
Israel has also arrested more than 2,600 Palestinians along the West Bank, with IDF soldiers conducting frequent raids in the occupied territory.
With Post wires