The terrorist group Daesh has claimed responsibility for an attack yesterday in the northern Israeli city of Hadera in which two police officers were killed. The gunmen are reported to have been Arab Israeli citizens. They wounded four others in the attack before being killed by police.

This was the second deadly attack to have been carried out in less than a week in the apartheid occupation state. On Tuesday, a knife-wielding man stabbed several people and ran over another in the southern city of Beersheba.

According to a statement earlier today on Daesh’s Amaq news website, “Two members of the Jewish [state’s] police force were killed and others were injured in an immersive commando attack.”

If true, this is the group’s first attack in Israel since 2017, when an Israeli policewoman was stabbed in Jerusalem, although Palestinian factions dismissed the claim at the time. In the same year, Daesh also carried out an isolated, unintended attack on Israeli territory, for which it reportedly apologised.

Yesterday’s attack took place while US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in the country, along with the foreign ministers of Bahrain, Morocco and the UAE who took part in a summit in the southern Negev Desert with their Israeli counterpart Yair Lapid to discuss “advancing a regional security architecture”. The summit has been condemned by Palestinian factions as a “summit of shame” and “stab in the back” of the Palestinian people.

Blinken used Twitter to condemn the “terrorist attack” in Hadera. “Such senseless acts of violence and murder have no place in society. We stand with our Israeli partners and send our condolences to the families of the victims.”