Four Israel Defense Forces soldiers were wounded, including two seriously, on Sunday afternoon in a car-ramming attack near the central Israeli city of Lod, the military confirmed.
“An IDF officer and soldier were seriously injured, an IDF soldier was moderately injured, and a cadet in an officers course was lightly injured,” the army said on Sunday night.
One of the soldiers was listed in critical condition, Shamir Medical Center (formerly Assaf Harofeh Hospital) in Be’er Ya’akov said.
The Magen David Adom emergency response group said its medics treated two men in their 20s in serious condition at the Nir Tzvi Junction, located close to the moshav of the same name and near the Israel Defense Forces’ Tzrifin base.
The commander of the Israel Police’s Central District, Supt. Avi Biton, told reporters that “the terrorist ran over several Israelis at a bus stop, continued a few hundred meters and carried out another run-over attack.”
Police said the assailant, whom they identified as 26-year-old Muhammad Shahab from the Kafr Aqab neighborhood of northeastern Jerusalem, was “neutralized” by Border Police officers and that the incident was being investigated as a terrorist attack.
The Gaza-based Hamas terrorist organization hailed the attack as a “heroic operation,” but stopped short of taking responsibility.
“When we arrived at the scene, we saw a vehicle that had hit pedestrians stopped at a bus stop. We immediately called additional forces to the scene,” said MDA first responders Michelle Rashkovski and Shneor Tsik.
“Near the bus stop, two men about 20 years old were lying down, one of them conscious and the other unconscious and both suffering from multiple life-threatening injuries. We immediately provided them life-saving medical treatment that included stopping the bleeding, immobilization and drug treatment and evacuated them in MDA’s intensive care units to Shamir-Assaf Harofeh Medical Center,” the two added.
In January, an Israeli woman in her 70s was killed and at least 17 other people were wounded in a combined car-ramming and stabbing attack in the central city of Ra’anana, some 16 miles north of Nir Tzvi.
In late May, two IDF soldiers died after a terrorist vehicular assault near the city of Nablus (Shechem) in Samaria.