Abdel Wahhab Issa Hussein Khalayleh came from a village near Hebron in the southern West Bank, according to a Hamas statement. The group initially misidentified his brother, Hussein, as the attacker.
The rare attack on the seaside city coincided with an ongoing operation in Jenin that has left at least 11 Palestinians dead and some 100 more injured, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry, and has forced thousands to flee their homes.
“The operation in Tel Aviv is the first response of the resistance to what is happening in Jenin,” said Khaled al-Batsh, an official with Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a militant group found in Gaza and the West Bank.
The influence of Hamas and other smaller, quasi-affiliated Hamas militant groups, Israeli security experts have said, has been growing as Israel conducts nearly nightly raids on West Bank towns — measures politicians insist are needed to deter Palestinian terrorist attacks.
“We knew that terror would raise his head,” said firebrand national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, at the site of the attack in Tel Aviv, calling on civilians to carry guns. He was questioned by a journalist in the crowd about campaign promises to ensure security for Israelis.
The Tel Aviv attack comes as Israel’s far-right government struggles to contain a new movement of Palestinian militants, fueled by young, disillusioned youths who have watched Israeli raids during the past year become longer and deadlier.
The raids have started to unfold more often during morning commutes and next to busy marketplaces, with civilians getting trapped in the middle, especially in Jenin, which has been targeted as a militant hotbed.
“Our broad operation in Jenin is not a one-time event,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday at a military base near Jenin. “We will not allow Jenin to go back to being a city of refuge for terrorism.”
Miri Eisin, a former senior intelligence officer in the Israeli military, said Israel is struggling to contain the groups in the city, which was on the way “to becoming the same thing as Gaza.”
“It’s an area that Israel is not in, and where Israel does not want to go into, but where, periodically, it will need to do something — what we call in Gaza ‘mowing the grass’ — to lower the risks,” she said, referencing the Israeli military strategy used since 2006 to counter Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad militants in the Gaza Strip.
In Gaza, Eisin said, the limited goal is to curb rocket fire; in Jenin, it is to limit Palestinian attackers.
Mahmoud Balas, 47, a resident of the Jenin camp, said that he, his wife and five children have been too afraid to flee their homes since the operation began on Monday, even as explosions and gunfire boomed outside their doors and electricity and water lines were disrupted by the fighting.
“It’s worse than 2002,” he said, referring to what became known as the Battle of Jenin, which lasted more than a week and resulted in at least 50 Palestinians and 23 Israeli soldiers killed.
“They are trying to bring the camp and its people to its knees, because it’s harming them,” Balas added. “But they will not succeed, God willing.”
“I am tired of having to leave my house again and again,” said Umm Haitham al-Batawi, a 66-year-old resident of the Jenin refugee camp, who spoke from the hospital where she said her daughter-in-law was being treated after being attacked by Israelis army dogs.
In a signal that the operation could soon be completed, the Israeli military said it had 10 targets remaining in Jenin. Far-right members of the government have called for a long-term occupation of the city.
“There is no point in the camp that we have not been, including the center,” Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, an Israel Defense Forces spokesman, tweeted, adding that soldiers expected to engage with armed militants throughout the day on Tuesday.
The Israeli army said that, overnight, it dismantled an “underground shaft that was used to store explosive devices in the heart of the Jenin Camp.” The statement added that soldiers destroyed “two operational situation rooms belonging to terrorist organizations in the area … a grenade launcher in the area of Jenin, and confiscated weapons and military equipment.”
The army also said that soldiers have been neutralizing explosives set by militants along the Jenin camp’s roads.
Hagari said that all of the Palestinians killed — most of them teenagers — and more than 120 arrested since the start of the operation on Monday were combatants.
Another Israeli military official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the security situation, said that an additional 300 armed combatants were still in Jenin, most in hiding.
An estimated 4,000 Palestinians fled the camp overnight, seeking shelter with family members in the surrounding city, according to Jenin’s mayor, Nidal Al-Obeidi. The Israeli military also suspected that some combatants had fled overnight, according to Israeli media.
Eitan Dangot, a former Israeli military coordinator for Palestinian civilian affairs in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, said that the military operation that began Monday aimed “to encircle the Jenin refugee camp as the capital of terrorism” and was only a partial solution that would not sufficiently deter future attacks.
Israel’s far-right government needed to develop ties with the Palestinian Authority, which is technically responsible for the region, he said, but has abandoned Jenin and other areas in the northern West Bank to lawlessness.
“I don’t see Israel running to take responsibility for the West Bank’s 3 million citizens … including a new generation of militants” who have been abandoned by the Palestinian Authority for nearly two decades, said Dangot, speaking as news broke of the car ramming in Tel Aviv.
The prolonged ground incursion follows a more than year-long Israeli attempt to clamp down on newly formed militias, especially in the Jenin camp and the surrounding area from where many of 50 Palestinians who attacked Israelis have originated.
As West Bank violence has spiraled, Israel has repeatedly asserted that it goes to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties in the crossfire. But the bloody battles being fought and weapons being used on the streets of Jenin are reminiscent of the Palestinian uprising from 2000 to 2005, known as the second intifada.
So far, 2023 is on pace to become one of the deadliest years for Palestinians, with more than 150 fatalities.
Many Palestinians also expected that the operation would just continue to fuel the cycle of violence.
“Buildings may crumble, cars may be reduced to wreckage, and countless individuals may be detained, wounded and even martyred,” said a statement from Mostafa Sheta, director of Jenin refugee camp’s Freedom Theater, which was a center of cultural Palestinian resistance throughout the second intifada. “These actions will only serve to breed a new generation that will carry the torch of resistance passed down by those who came before them, as we do today, and as our children will do in the future.”
Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem said Tuesday that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was responsible for the escalation and that Jenin “has been and will remain unbreakable.”
Balousha reported from Gaza City. Sufian Taha in Jenin contributed to this report.
