Police shot and killed a knife-wielding man in Bat Yam on Sunday after he ran toward officers on Hashikma Street, police said. The incident was first reported at around 2 p.m., when police said a suspicious man armed with a knife had run toward officers who were in the street.
According to police, the officers “acted quickly and, in response to the threat, fired at the suspect in order to neutralize and stop him.” The man was initially taken to Wolfson Medical Center in Holon in serious condition, according to medical officials, and later died of his wounds.
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Police said the incident had been transferred for review by the relevant authorities, as is standard procedure. Investigators are also examining whether the man was mentally unstable. Police later said the emergency hotline had received a report about a 54-year-old man who was acting wildly and damaging vehicles. Officers arrived at the scene, identified the suspect and, at some point, saw him holding a drawn knife and running toward them. “The officers felt their lives were in danger and fired at him,” police said. Police said the background to the incident was criminal.
The shooting came days after a similar incident in Lod, where Sami Gaasus, 28, was shot dead after police said he ran toward officers with a knife. That incident began with a call to the police emergency hotline from a woman who reported a young man holding a knife near Lod City Hall. Police said officers in a patrol car identified the suspect holding a knife and called on him to stop.
According to police, Gaasus then ran toward a team of Yasam special patrol officers operating in the area and allegedly attacked one of them and tried to stab him. An officer shot him in a dirt lot in the Ramat Eshkol neighborhood, about 500 meters from the original scene. He was killed, and no one else was injured.
Immediately after last week’s shooting, police described the Lod incident as an attempted terrorist attack and said a “terrorist” had been neutralized. About an hour later, police said all possible motives were being investigated. Relatives of Gaasus said he had been released from a mental health facility about two months earlier. “He was not mentally well. He panicked when police came toward him, pulled out scissors, and then they emptied a magazine into him,” his cousin said. “If they wanted to neutralize him, why didn’t they shoot him in the legs?”