Tel aviv car-ramming: Israel mobilises reserves after deadly attacks

Israel began calling up police and army reservists yesterday after separate attacks killed three people, including an Italian tourist, in Tel Aviv and the occupied West Bank.

The European Union condemned the attacks in Israel and a barrage of rockets fired from Lebanon that triggered Israeli strikes and called for “restraint”.

“The EU expresses its total condemnation of these acts of violence. This must cease,” the bloc’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said in a statement yesterday.

Borrell also condemned the “indiscriminate” rocket fire from the Gaza Strip and Lebanon.

Despite appeals for restraint, including by EU, violence has surged since Israeli police clashed with Palestinians inside Jerusalem’s flashpoint Al-Aqsa mosque on Wednesday, with Israel bombarding both Gaza and Lebanon in response to rocket fire by Palestinian militants.

The Italian was killed and seven other tourists wounded when an Israeli Arab ploughed a car into pedestrians on the Tel Aviv seafront on Friday evening and flipped over before being shot dead, police and emergency services said.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni named the dead man as Alessandro Parini, 36.

Police identified the driver as a 45-year-old from the Arab town of Kfar Kassem in central Israel.

“The terrorist was neutralised,” a spokesman told AFP.

Following the Tel Aviv attack, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu instructed the police to “mobilise all reserve border police units” and directed the army to “mobilise additional forces”, his office said.

Police said four reserve battalions of border police would be deployed in city centres from Sunday, in addition to units already deployed in the Jerusalem region and in the central city of Lod, which has a mixed population of Jews and Arabs.

In the West Bank, Israeli troops came under fire in a drive-by shooting in the northern town of Yabad overnight, the army said yesterday.

One hit was identified among the assailants, an army statement said.

Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, which rules Gaza, said the attack was a “natural and legitimate response” to Israel’s “aggression” in the Al-Aqsa mosque.

Earlier Friday, two British-Israeli sisters aged 16 and 20 were killed, and their mother seriously wounded when their car was fired on in the Jordan Valley in the occupied West Bank.

The army said it had launched a manhunt for the perpetrators.