An Italian man has died and five other British and Italian tourists have been injured in an attack in the Israeli coastal city of Tel Aviv, the latest episode of violence after several days of rising tensions sparked fears of a broader conflagration in the region.
The 30-year-old Italian died from a gunshot wound, Israel’s rescue service said on Friday night, the Jewish holy day. At the same time, Israeli police said a car had been driven into people near the beach, and that the driver had been shot and killed. It was not immediately clear if there had been one incident, or two separate ones
Israeli media reported that the assailant was an Arab citizen of Israel, from the northern town of Kafr Qasem.
The Italian man was named as Alessandro Parini from Rome by the country’s premier, Giorgia Meloni, who expressed “solidarity with Israel for the vile attack”. Israel’s rescue service said five other British and Italian tourists — including a 74-year-old man and a 17-year-old girl — were receiving medical treatment for mild to moderate injuries.
The prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, ordered the mobilisation of police and army reserves after the incident, his office said in a statement.
Video of the incident shared on social media showed that the car had veered off the street and onto path before flipping over over onto the beach.
The attack comes against a backdrop of fears of escalation in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict drawing in the powerful Lebanese militant group Hezbollah after Israel bombed sites in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon early on Friday in response to rocket fire blamed on Palestinian militants from the two territories.
Israel and Lebanon are technically still at war, and Thursday’s barrage of about 34 rockets aimed at northern Israel was the biggest flare-up between the two countries since a short war with the Iran-backed militant group in 2006.
The situation along the borders appeared to have calmed by dawn, and the lack of casualties in the frontier standoffs also suggested that no side wanted to risk further hostilities.
More than 130,000 worshippers attended Friday prayers at Jerusalem’s holiest site, which passed without significant incident despite the tensions and an influx of pilgrims celebrating the rare overlapping festivals of Easter, Passover and Ramadan.
But a shooting attack in the West Bank which killed two British-Israeli sisters and critically injured their mother a few hours later, the shooting down of a drone that entered Israeli territory from Lebanon, and the attack in Tel Aviv suggested that wider escalation is still a substantial threat.
The current round of fighting began on Wednesday, after Israeli police twice raided occupied East Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque compound, which is sacred to Muslims and Jews, who call it the Temple Mount. Video of police beating Palestinian worshippers with batons and the butts of rifles was met with widespread anger across the Muslim world,