An Arab gunman opened fire from a car at multiple locations around central Israel on Sunday, killing an Israeli man and injuring at least five people in what authorities called a terrorist attack.
Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, said the assailant was an Arab citizen of Israel from the town of Tayibe, near the attack sites. The assailant had a criminal record, according to Daniel Levy, the Israeli police commissioner, who spoke alongside Mr. Ben-Gvir at the scene of one of the shootings.
The police, the military, the prime minister and other government officials in Israel said they believed the motive for the attack was terrorism.
Arab citizens of Israel make up about a fifth of the country’s population. Criminal gun violence is rife within Israel’s Arab community, but armed terrorist attacks by Arab citizens in the country are rare.
Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that long ruled the Gaza Strip, praised the shooting as “heroic,” though it did not claim responsibility.
The Israeli police said its forces had tracked down the suspected gunman after a brief chase and killed him. Hours later, the police said they had arrested another man in connection with the attacks, adding that he attempted to stab detectives with a glass bottle before he was subdued.
The attacks began at a gas station at the entrance of Kochav Yair, an Israeli town along the boundary dividing Israel from the occupied West Bank. The gunman then drove to several nearby locations, firing at various people and zigzagging across the boundary as security forces pursued him.
Israel’s ambulance service, Magen David Adom, said that an Israeli man died from gunshot wounds and that five wounded people were taken to hospitals.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised local security teams and the police for quickly reacting to the attacks. In remarks at the start of a cabinet meeting on Sunday, he said that Israel was contending with terrorism “on all fronts,” including in the West Bank and along the so-called “seam line” dividing the territory from Israel.
Walid Diwani, a senior paramedic, said in a statement that when he arrived at the gas station, he saw a man “lying on the ground near the fuel pumps, with bystanders trying to assist him.”
As he and other paramedics began treating the man, Mr. Diwani said, civilians at the scene told him there was another injured person in a nearby restaurant. There, he saw another man who was severely wounded.
“He was pale and breathing slowly,” Mr. Diwani said.
Another paramedic, Lior Zilberberg, described finding two injured people, a man and a woman, at the entrance to Tzur Yitzhak, a small community that is a short drive away from Kochav Yair. Paramedics discovered another man inside a vehicle near a neighboring community, Tzur Natan. He had no pulse and was pronounced dead at the scene.
A fifth man lay near the vehicle with gunshot wounds to his upper body, according to the ambulance service.
Mr. Ben-Gvir, the far-right national security minister, arrived at the scene shortly after the shootings. “There is a group among Israeli Arabs — not all of them — but a group that hates the state, and we need to crack down on them,” he said.
Mr. Ben-Gvir, a populist who was convicted in the past on charges of inciting racism, campaigned in Israel’s 2022 national election on a promise to restore law and order. But critics say he has done little to rein in the criminal violence plaguing Israel’s Arab minority, which has claimed more than a hundred lives this year.
Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s far-right finance minister, said in a social media post that Sunday’s attack was “a bloody wake up call for the profound change that must take place among Arab Israelis.”
“Hundreds of thousands of illegal weapons, including anti-tank missiles, M16 machine guns, and explosive devices, alongside rampant crime and nationalist radicalization, pose an existential threat,” he added.
Heedo Abu Laban contributed reporting.
Isabel Kershner, a senior correspondent for The Times in Jerusalem, has been reporting on Israeli and Palestinian affairs since 1990.
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