ELEVEN people were stabbed yesterday on and near a bus in central Tel Aviv during the morning rush hour, with three seriously injured.

The assailant managed to get off the bus and flee, stabbing a woman in the back on the way, before being shot and arrested by prison officers who happened to be nearby.

Police described the stabbings as a “terror attack” and identified the man as Hamza Mohammed Matroukh, a 23-year-old resident of the occupied West Bank.

The suspect was questioned and police said that he claimed to have carried out the stabbings in response to Israel’s bloody assault on Gaza last year and ongoing clashes over Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque.

Israeli troops killed 2,300 Gazans last summer during Operation Protective Edge, 1,600 of them civilians.

Hamas official Izzat Risheq said in a tweet that yesterday’s attack was a “natural response to the occupation and its terrorist crimes against our people.”