BREAKING NEWS

Wild car chase leaves five wounded as Palestinian man evades police

A wild police car chase in central Israel left five people hospitalized as a Palestinian man who ran a police checkpoint drove the wrong way up a highway exit ramp to escape officers.
Tel Aviv police said the chase began Saturday morning in Givat Shmuel, where officers had set up a roadblock to check motorists. The driver refused to stop at the checkpoint, police said, and officers began to pursue him as he fled Givat Shmuel outside Tel Aviv.
Police who ran the car’s license plates saw that it belonged to a woman from East Jerusalem, leading them to suspect that they could potentially be facing a security incident or a possible terror attack in the making.
With the cops trailing him, the driver began speeding the wrong way up an exit ramp on highway 4 in Petach Tikvah, where a pursuing officer hit a car head on. The police officer was moderately injured in the collision, as were four civilians.
Magen David Adom Paramedic Avichai Hadad said there was a woman in her 40s with severe head injuries sitting in one vehicle on the side of the road along with a man in his 50s suffering from moderate injuries to his limbs. In another car, Hadad said paramedics found two men in their 20s suffering from moderate head injuries. Hadad said the woman was unconscious and placed on a respirator and taken to the Sharon Hospital along with the other victims.
Despite the collision on the highway, the driver managed to get away, though a few hours later he turned himself in to police. The driver was described by police as a 52-year-old resident of Bethlehem.
The owner of the vehicle, a woman from East Jerusalem, was also taken for questioning by police, who have opened an investigation into why the man ran the checkpoint to begin with.