Israeli police say killed bus station knife attacker

JERUSALEM (AFP): Israeli police said they shot dead a suspect in a knife attack that wounded two people Sunday at the main bus station in the southern city of Beersheva.

Medics said they treated a 20-year-old man at the scene “with a stab wound to his body” before he was taken to hospital.

Police said another person was also lightly hurt.

“The terrorist who carried out the stabbing attack was neutralized on the spot,” said police, later clarifying that he was dead.

Israeli media said that the attacker was a young Bedouin man and Israeli citizen whose clan hails from the Negev desert region of which Beersheva is the largest city.

There has been a series of deadly knife attacks across Israel and the occupied West Bank since the war in Gaza was sparked by the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7.

Some 1,160 people — mostly civilians — were killed in the unprecedented Hamas attack in Israel, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

Israel’s retaliatory campaign has so far killed at least 32,705 people, mostly women and children, the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said Sunday.