A new attack, the fourth in two weeks, threatened Thursday, April 7 to shake a feverish Israeli government, deprived the day before of its majority in Parliament, and on which the opposition has been raining accusations of ” weakness “. The attack mourned the center of Tel Aviv. At around 9 p.m., a Palestinian opened fire in the direction of the terrace of the Ilka bar, with what appeared to be a handgun on amateur video. He killed two people and caused panic on Dizengoff Avenue, a very busy artery this last weekend before Passover.
Fifteen people were hospitalized, four operated on overnight. A thousand police and special forces of the army de facto placed the center of the metropolis under curfew for nine hours, before killing the assailant around 6 am. Internal intelligence had located the 28-year-old terrorist near a mosque in the former Palestinian city of Jaffa, now a suburb of Tel Aviv. Since March 22, armed attacks in Israel have caused the death of 13 civilians.
On Friday morning, residents of the Jenin refugee camp, in the West Bank occupied since 1967, celebrated the “martyrdom” of the perpetrator of the Tel Aviv attack, a man named Raed Hazem, identified as the son of a local family. Between 1er January and March 21, the Israeli army killed 18 Palestinian civilians in the West Bank, including in East Jerusalem, according to the UN’s Office of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Three of them were carrying out isolated attacks against Israelis.
‘Natural response’ to Israel’s ‘crimes’
Last week, the army carried out a series of raids in the region, where the author of the previous attack was from, which killed five people in the heart of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Bnei Brak (center). In a rare show of force, the army had carried out around thirty arrests in broad daylight in the Jenin camp, which had been in a semi-insurgent state for a year. They were targeting supporters of Islamic Jihad, a small armed sister organization to Hamas. Three of his fighters had been killed in these raids. Thursday evening, the Jihad “greeted” the attack on Tel Aviv, which he considers a “natural response” to the “crimes” of Israel, including the Jenin raid.
This attack takes place while the Israeli government, in power since June 2021, is weakened by the defection of a religious far-right MP, member of the Prime Minister’s party, Naftali Bennett (5 seats), who deprives her of her narrow majority in the Knesset (60 out of 120). His training is struggling to come to terms with his break with his former political “family”, led by former Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu. This leaves the government with a dilemma.
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