# Hamas claims deadly Jaffa shooting that killed seven as Iran launches barrage
On Oct. 2, 2024, Hamas's armed wing claimed responsibility for a shooting and stabbing attack in Jaffa that left seven people dead and many others wounded, according to the supplied Al Jazeera report. The timing made the attack especially tense: it came moments before Iran launched a barrage of rockets at Israel late on Tuesday, pushing people across the country into bomb shelters.
The Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades said the attack was carried out by two fighters from Hebron, whom it named as Mohammed Misk and Ahmed al-Haimoni. Israeli police said the suspects entered a light-rail carriage that had stopped at the station and opened fire on passengers, then continued the attack on foot with a knife before being neutralized. One of the attackers was killed and the other seriously wounded, according to police.
The report said Israeli media identified three of the dead as Israelis and one as Georgian, while Greek and Moldovan governments said other victims were their nationals. The identity of the seventh victim was not immediately released. That mix of nationalities underlined how the attack affected civilians beyond a single community and turned an evening transit stop into a site of mass killing.
Israeli security services later arrested several suspects in Hebron and Jerusalem whom they believed had helped the attackers. The source also set the assault in the larger context of the war that began after Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7, 2023. By this point, the Gaza war had driven up casualties in both Gaza and the West Bank, and violence in the occupied territory had surged as Israeli troops and settlers stepped up raids and attacks.
The story captured two linked fronts at once. In Jaffa, the immediate event was a deadly urban attack on a light-rail stop. In the background, Iran's missile volley showed how the conflict had widened enough that a local shooting and a regional missile strike could land within minutes of each other. The result was another day in which civilian transit, national politics and regional warfare collapsed into one another with little warning.
The Jaffa attack also fed the sense that the war was becoming a single connected event rather than separate theaters. A shooting on a light-rail carriage, a claimed Hamas statement and an Iranian missile volley all happened in the same narrow time window. That compressed timeline matters because it makes the assault feel less like a local act of violence and more like part of a regional chain reaction. For the families of the dead, though, the nationality of the attackers or the timing of the barrage did not change the fact that a commuter stop became a scene of mass killing.
The attack's timing, just before Iran's missile volley, made the street killings feel like part of a single regional sequence rather than a stand-alone incident. That matters because it shows how a local transit stop can be swept into a much larger confrontation almost instantly. For police and hospitals, the immediate task was response; for everyone else, it was another sign of how unpredictable the war had become.
