Israeli police on Sunday said a female border officer was killed in a shooting attack on a bus station that first responders say injured 10 others.
The incident took place a day before the first anniversary of the October 7 Hamas attack.
“Paramedics have pronounced a 25-year-old female deceased, and are evacuating 10 casualties,” emergency service provider Magen David Adom said in a statement.
Police identified the victim as Sergeant Shira Haya Suslik, a member of the border police, and said she “fell during an encounter with a terrorist in an attack that occurred today at the central bus station in Beersheba.”
Police said the incident was being treated as a “suspected terrorist attack”.
“A number of injured on the scene. The terrorist was neutralised at the scene and many police forces of the southern district are at the scene,” said a police spokesman in a statement.
Hamas praised the “heroic” attack, saying it “came in defence of our people, our land, and our holy sites”.
The incident comes just days after a Hamas-claimed shooting attack last week in which seven people were killed in Israel’s commercial hub of Tel Aviv.
The Tel Aviv attack — one of the deadliest in the country since the October 7 Hamas attack — came as Iran fired about 200 missiles at Israel, sending hundreds of thousands of people into public shelters.
Israel and Hamas have been at war in Gaza since the October 7 attack on Israel that resulted in the deaths of 1,205 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
Israel’s retaliatory military campaign has killed at least 41,870 people in Gaza, the majority of them civilians, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry. The United Nations has said the figures are reliable.
