JERUSALEM — At least two people were killed and eight others wounded in a shooting on Thursday night outside a bar on a busy street in central Tel Aviv, the latest in the deadliest wave of terrorism in Israel since 2016.
Medics said the shooting occurred at around 9 p.m. on the last night of the Israeli working week, outside a bar filled with people enjoying the start of the weekend. An hour later, the police still had not located the shooter or shooters and instructed residents to stay home, according to a police statement.
The shooting was the sixth attack in Israel in less than three weeks, and heightened fears of an even more intense surge over the next 10 days, when the rare convergence of Ramadan, Passover and Easter is expected to raise tensions further between Israelis and Palestinians.
An Israeli emergency medical group, Magen David Adom, said its medics had taken six wounded people to Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv, three of them in serious or critical condition. The hospital later said that at least two people died.
Broadcasters showed video of the debris outside the bar, where emergency responders and police officers stood beside a pile of broken glass.
Yisrael Weingarten, an M.D.A. paramedic who treated some of the victims, said he witnessed “a large commotion at the scene, with dozens of people running in the streets,” and six “patients lying on the sidewalk.”
“We immediately began treatment, including bleeding control and bandaging,” Mr. Weingarten added, in a statement circulated by M.D.A.
The attack on Thursday occurred 10 days after a gun attack in Bnei Brak, a city just east of Tel Aviv, in which a Palestinian attacker killed three Israelis and two Ukrainians.
That incident came just two days after a gun attack in which two Arab citizens of Israel, armed with heavy automatic weapons, fatally shot two police officers in Hadera, a coastal city in northern Israel.
The string of deadly attacks began March 22, when an assailant stabbed three people and rammed another with his car in a city in southern Israel, killing all four. Before the March 22 assault, there had been other nonlethal attacks.
Most attacks in recent years have been carried out with knives, so the surge in the use of firearms has been of particular concern to security officials, because it implies an unusual level of forethought and resources.
Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting from Haifa, Israel.
