One Israeli soldier was killed and another seriously wounded in a terrorist stabbing in a shopping center in the northern city of Karmiel on Wednesday.
Magen David Adom paramedics treated the two victims, both males in their 20s, on the scene before evacuating them to Galilee Medical Center in Nahariya, where one of them died of his wounds.
The slain victim was identified on Wednesday evening as Israel Defense Forces Sgt. Aleksandr Iakiminskyi, 19, from Nahariya. The military said he served as a driver in the 188th Armored Brigade’s 71st Battalion.
The terrorist was shot dead by the second victim, the commander of the Israel Police Northern District, Maj. Gen. Shuki Tahauko, told local media following a situational assessment.
Tahauko told reporters that the terrorist arrived at the mall on foot before stabbing the two victims, one of whom managed to “keep it together and immediately neutralized the terrorist.”
Police identified the terrorist as 21-year-old Jawwad Omar Rubia, from the nearby town of Nahf. Tahauko was said to have ordered the arrest of his relatives, with local media reporting a large police presence in Nahf.
“When I arrived at the shopping mall I was sent to the second floor. I saw two casualties, males in their 20s, lying close to the stalls with penetrating wounds. One was unconscious,” said MDA paramedic Ran Moskowitz.
In January, an Israeli soldier was wounded in a car-ramming attack near a naval base in the northern city of Haifa. The terrorist, identified as Wassim Abu al-Hoga—an Arab Israeli from Tamra in the Lower Galilee—drove a car into the 20-year-old victim and then attacked him with an ax.
On Tuesday, an Israeli man was moderately wounded when Palestinian terrorists fired on the Mitzpe Yosef outpost on Mount Gerizim near Nablus (Shechem) in Samaria.