One dead, 32 wounded in suspected terror ramming at bus stop north of Tel Aviv

Police say driver ‘neutralized,’ launch probe into his motive; medics say 8 people were trapped under truck that plowed into crowd at Glilot, near IDF intelligence base

By Emanuel Fabian Follow and ToI Staff Today 26-10-2024, 4:06 pm

A man was killed and 32 people were wounded in a suspected terror ramming attack at a bus stop near Herzliya on Sunday morning — five in serious condition, seven moderately wounded, and 20 lightly hurt.

Police said that the driver who rammed his truck into people at a bus stop outside the IDF’s Glilot base in central Israel, north of Tel Aviv, was shot and “neutralized” by armed civilians in the area.

According to the police’s initial probe, a bus had stopped at the station outside the base to drop off passengers, and then a truck rammed into the stop, hitting the people there.

Hamas put out a statement a short while after the incident, praising the “heroic ramming attack” that was carried out near “Mossad headquarters.”

The Glilot area near Herzliya is home to the Mossad headquarters along with several IDF intelligence units, including the high-profile signals intelligence Unit 8200.

Without taking responsibility for the apparent attack, the terror group said that it was “a natural response to the crimes of the Zionist occupation against our Palestinian people in Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem, and its ongoing brutal massacres, especially in the northern Gaza Strip.”

The Magen David Adom emergency service said eight people were trapped under the truck when medics arrived at the bus stop, and other were lying or walking nearby.

Officers and ambulances rushed to the scene, where police cordoned off the area as medics helped the injured and a helicopter hovered above.

Following the attack, Tel Aviv’s Ichilov Hospital said one of the victims of the suspected terror attack was in critical condition. A short while later, the hospital released a statement saying that  doctors had pronounced one victim dead. It was unclear whether he was the same victim who was critically injured.

Many of the injured were senior citizens who had disembarked from a bus ahead of a visit to a nearby museum to mark the national memorial day for those killed in the October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre and subsequent war.

Police were probing further details, including the motive of the attack.

In a separate incident in the West Bank on Sunday, the Israel Defense Forces said a Palestinian motorist who tried to carry out a ramming and stabbing attack against IDF troops near the West Bank town of Hizma was shot dead.

According to the IDF, the assailant accelerated his car toward troops of the Binyamin Regional Brigade’s 43rd Battalion, as they were operating near Hizma.

“The terrorist drew a knife… and tried to carry out a stabbing attack,” the IDF said, adding that the soldiers opened fire at the assailant, killing him.

There were no other injuries in the incident.

Police said the Route 437 highway in the area was blocked to traffic following the incident.

The attacks on Sunday came as Israel marked the first anniversary on the Hebrew calendar of Hamas’s October 7 mass onslaught against southern Israel, the worst terror attack in Israel’s history, when 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage to Gaza.

Since then, 41 people, including Israeli security personnel, have been killed in a string of additional terror attacks in Israel and the West Bank. Another six members of the security forces were killed in clashes with terror operatives in the West Bank.

In mid-October, a policeman was killed and four people wounded when a terrorist opened fire along the Route 4 highway north of the coastal city of Ashdod, and a man was killed in a terror-stabbing rampage in Hadera the previous week. Seven people were killed and at least eight wounded in a shooting and stabbing attack in Jaffa on October 1, just minutes before Iran launched a massive ballistic missile attack on Israel.

Agencies contributed to this report.