Another Construction Vehicle Attack in Israel
An Israeli security force officer guarded the scene of a rampage by the Palestinian driver of a construction vehicle in downtown Jerusalem on Tuesday.
JERUSALEM -- For the second time in a month, a Palestinian driver of a large construction vehicle plowed into traffic on a busy Jerusalem street on Tuesday, hitting a bus, mangling cars and injuring at least 24 people before the driver was shot dead by an off-duty soldier and a border policeman.
The attack, the second attack in Jerusalem this month involving a construction vehicle, took place on King David Street near the Liberty Bell Park in Jerusalem's upscale hotel district, close to the King David Hotel. Local media reports said Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, was due to stay at the hotel on Tuesday evening. Mr. Obama is on a weeklong tour as part of an American delegation.
The hotel is where visiting dignitaries usually stay in Jerusalem, and where President Bush has stayed in the past.
There were no fatalities besides the driver of the construction vehicle, the authorities said, although at least one person was badly injured. The police were treating it as a terrorist attack and said the driver, who was in his early 20s, came from the village of Umm Tuba, an Arab village within the southern limits of Jerusalem that has a strong Hamas presence.
He was stopped when the off-duty soldier shot into the vehicle. An acquaintance of his, in an interview on the street, said he was a settler from the southern Hebron district of the West Bank. The driver of the construction vehicle was shot a second time by a border policeman who arrived at the scene shortly after, the police said, "to confirm his death."
On July 2, a Palestinian drove another construction vehicle on a deadly rampage in central Jerusalem, crushing several cars and ramming into buses and pedestrians before an off-duty soldier and a police officer clambered up to the cabin and fatally shot him. At least three people were killed in that attack, and more than 40 were wounded, Israeli officials said.
In a third attack in the city this year, a Palestinian from East Jerusalem opened fire at a prominent Jewish seminary in the heart of Jerusalem in March, killing eight students.
On the street minutes after Tuesday's attack, which took place at around 2 p.m., one car was crushed and another turned over. Many of those injured were still being led away from the scene by the emergency services, and the area had been closed off.
Yonatan Yagadovsky, director of the international department of Magen David Adom rescue organization, said one person had lost a leg.
After the attack, eyewitnesses said the construction vehicle, which they described as a large digger, was riddled with bullets, and the body of the driver was being removed by the authorities from the cab.
Witnesses said the vehicle was driven from a construction site behind the YMCA building opposite the hotel. When the vehicle emerged onto King David street, it first hit a bus, the driver of which reacted quickly and drove off the road, according to an eyewitness, Bentzi Gottesman, 24, who was working in a nearby gallery.
The construction vehicle then proceeded slowly along the main street, deliberately hitting cars along the way, Mr. Gottesman said. "I heard a big boom. I went out. I saw the tractor going into a bus. He hit the back part."
Another eyewitness, Moshe Feiglin, said: "The first thing, he tried was to lower the shovel on a female pedestrian right near me. I jumped when there was a boom as the shovel hit the street. He missed by centimeters, thank God. In the first second I thought it was some kind of accident, confusion, but then he continued in a zigzag on King David Street, hitting cars, turning over cars."
Jerusalem police commander Aharon Franko told Israel radio: "When he got to Plummer junction, he was shot by a civilian and a border policeman on patrol." Commander Franko said the attack lasted just a matter of seconds.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/23/world/middleeast/23israel.html
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