At least 12 people were wounded Wednesday morning, four of them seriously, when a Palestinian from the West Bank suddenly drew a knife and started stabbing people on a crowded passenger bus during Tel Aviv’s morning rush hour, Ynet reported.

At roughly 7:15 am a terrorist boarded Dan Line 40 bus on Begin Road in Tel Aviv near the Beit Maariv Bridge and stabbed the bus driver and a number of passengers before fleeing the scene.

The assailant, a 23 year old male from the West Bank city of Tulkarem who entered Israel illegally, was shot in the leg and taken into custody by Israeli police.

The Los Angeles Times reports that the bus driver fought off the assailant and helped passengers escape the attacker.

The stabbing is being treated as a “terror attack,” Israel Police foreign press spokesman Micky Rosenfeld wrote on Twitter.

The Hamas terrorist organization that controls Gaza was quick to praise the attack. Izzat a-Rishq, a Hamas official, described the terror attack as a “heroic act” (Arabic link), saying:

“The stabbing attack against the Zionists in Tel Aviv is a courageous and heroic act and a natural response to the crimes of the occupation and its terrorism against our people.”

The violence on the bus in Tel Aviv is another in a string of attacks by Palestinians against civilian targets including using cars to run over pedestrians in Jerusalem that killed several people. In November a soldier was stabbed to death in a Tel Aviv terror attack. Palestinian social media have praised and encouraged the attacks.

Senior Hamas official Mousa Abu Marzouk also called the stabbings “resistance and heroism,’ while the Palestine Information Center tweeted a cartoon of a smiling blood-stained knife in Palestinian flag colors, dripping blood onto an Israeli flag.

[Photos by Arik Agassi, The Israel Project]