Prevented terror attack: Police: Explosion in Tel Aviv was attempted attack

According to police, a deadly explosion in Tel Aviv was an attempted terrorist attack. An explosive device in a man’s backpack exploded on Sunday evening in the coastal metropolis as he was walking along a street in the south of the city. The suspected attacker was killed and an e-scooter rider was injured.

“It can now be confirmed that it was a terrorist attack in which a powerful explosive device exploded,” said a joint statement from the police and the domestic intelligence service Shin Bet. Security forces in the greater Tel Aviv area were subsequently put on high alert. “We call on citizens to remain vigilant and to report any suspicious person or object to the police.”

The military wings of the Palestinian terrorist organizations Hamas and Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the attempted attack. They will rely more heavily on such attacks “as long as the massacres by the occupying power, the expulsion of civilians and the policy of assassinations continue,” the organizations said in a joint statement.

The police did not comment on the identity of the suspect. The public broadcaster Kan reported that they assumed he was a Palestinian from Nablus in the West Bank. The newspaper “Haaretz” wrote that the police assumed that the target of the attack was a nearby synagogue.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog said at a meeting with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken that a serious terrorist attack had apparently been prevented in Tel Aviv the previous evening. The coastal city on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean has been the site of repeated serious attacks by Palestinians in the past.

A police spokesman told the Israeli army radio station that if the explosion had occurred just a few meters away, “we would have woken up to a huge catastrophe.” In the evening, the exact background was initially unclear, and the police had announced that they were investigating in all directions.