NEAR ALLENBY BRIDGE CROSSING, West Bank (Reuters) -A gunman from Jordan killed three Israeli civilians at the Allenby Bridge border crossing in the occupied West Bank before security forces shot him dead on Sunday, Israeli authorities said.
It was the first attack of its kind along the border with Jordan since Oct. 7, when Palestinian Islamist group Hamas carried out an assault on southern Israel, sparking the war in Gaza that has escalated throughout the region.
The attack took place in a commercial cargo area under Israeli control where Jordanian trucks offload cargo entering the West Bank, officials said. The crossing, also known as the King Hussein Bridge, lies about midway between Amman and Jerusalem just north of the Dead Sea.
The assailant was a 39-year-old truck driver who came from the influential Huwaitat tribe in southern Jordan, according to family members. He was later identified by the Jordanian interior ministry as Maher Ziab Hussein al-Jazi, a resident of the Husseiniya area in Jordan’s southern Ma’an governorate.
“A terrorist approached the area of the Allenby Bridge from Jordan in a truck, exited the truck, and opened fire at the Israeli security forces operating at the bridge,” the Israeli military said.
“The terrorist was eliminated by the security forces, three Israeli civilians were pronounced dead as a result of the attack.”
Jordan was investigating the shooting. The Allenby Bridge, a crucial crossing for trade between Jordan and Israel and one of five land border crossings between the two countries, has been closed, Jordan’s interior ministry added. The crossing mostly serves the more than 3 million Palestinians living in the West Bank.
The Israeli manager of the crossing said three workers were shot dead at close range by the driver crossing from Jordan.
Anti-Israeli sentiment runs high in Jordan, and hundreds of people took to the streets of the capital Amman to celebrate the attack, saying the gunman had avenged the deaths of thousands of Palestinians in the war in Gaza.
Israel and Jordan signed a peace treaty in 1994 and have close security ties. Dozens of trucks cross daily from Jordan, with goods from Jordan and the Gulf that supply both the West Bank and Israeli markets.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog, whose role is largely ceremonial, urged all parties to investigate the incident to prevent repeat attacks.
(Reporting by Ilan Rosenberg, Ari Rabinovitch, Suleiman, Al-Khalidi, Adam Makary and Ahmed Tolba; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne and Ros Russell)
