An Israeli soldier was stabbed and lightly wounded in the southern city of Ashkelon on Sunday and the assailant was shot, Israeli police said.
It was the latest incident in an almost four-month long surge of Israeli-on-Palestinian deadly repression met with violent responses by Palestinians against settlers and Israeli soldiers.
Another soldier grabbed the wounded soldier's gun and shot the attacker after the stabbing near a bus station, the police said, without providing further details on the assailant's condition.
Police said it was a suspected "nationalist" attack -- the phrase used by Israeli authorities for Palestinian attacks against Israelis.
The recent surge in violence has raised concern of wider escalation, a decade after the last Palestinian uprising subsided.
Since the start of October, Israeli occupation forces have killed at least 160 Palestinians. Meanwhile, almost daily stabbings, shootings and car-ramming attacks by frustrated and unarmed Palestinians have killed 25 Israelis and a US citizen.
The current wave of protests by Palestinians and repression by Israeli occupation forces started in late July when toddler Ali Dawabsha was burned to death and three other Palestinians were severely injured after their house in the occupied West Bank was set on fire by Israeli settlers.
Settlement-building, racial discrimination, confiscation of identity cards, long queues at checkpoints, as well as daily clashes and the desecration of Al-Aqsa mosque, describe Palestinians' daily suffering.
The anger of Palestinian residents of Jerusalem has increased in the last three years after the Israeli authorities allowed increasing numbers of Jewish settlers to storm the Al-Aqsa mosque.
The surge in violence has been fuelled by Palestinians' frustration over Israel's 48-year occupation of land they seek for an independent state, and the expansion of settlements in those territories which were captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war.
Palestinian leaders say a younger generation sees no hope for the future living under Israeli security restrictions and with a stifled economy. The latest round of US-brokered peace talks collapsed in April 2014.
*The story has been edited by Ahram Online.
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