Israeli soldier stabbed in suspected Palestinian attack in Tel Aviv: police

[November 10, 2014]  JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A Palestinian stabbed and critically an Israeli soldier near a Tel Aviv train station on Monday, police said, as anti-Israel violence that has raised fears of a new Palestinian uprising in the making reached the country's business capital.

Israeli-Palestinian tensions have festered over access to a Jerusalem compound housing Islam's third holiest site and where biblical Jewish temples once stood. Stone-throwing protests have also erupted in several Arab towns in Israel since Saturday, when police killed an Arab youth who assaulted them.

A spokesman for the Magen David Adom ambulance service said the Israeli soldier, aged about 20, was rushed to hospital after Monday's stabbing in Tel Aviv.

"I saw the terrorist, in a red shirt and jeans, running in the direction of Levanda Street ... I chased him, and came back and saw the soldier writhing on the ground," a witness said on Israel Radio.

Police said the attacker had stabbed the soldier several times and they arrested a suspect, a Palestinian from the town of Nablus in the occupied West Bank. They said the assault was apparently politically motivated.

Five days ago, a Palestinian rammed his car into pedestrians in central Jerusalem, the second such incident of its kind in as many weeks, killing two Israelis. Police shot the driver dead.

(Reporting by Jeffrey Heller, Editing by Luke Baker and Mark Heinrich)

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