“He was drenched in blood, stabbed all over”, Vaknin said.
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“We managed to close the doors and he tried to force them open”.
The building houses stores and offices and had been cordoned off by police after the attack.
Police said one Israeli was killed by gunfire. The military said soldiers shot at the attacker, although his condition and identity were unknown.
Five more deaths has taken to 86 the number killed in Israeli-Palestinian violence.
The attack was cut short when a civilian overpowered the 36-year-old assailant and held him for police, the Haaretz newspaper reported.
It was not immediately clear whether the victims were killed by gunfire or the impact of the vehicle.
“I heard cries and my Arab employee told me: “He’s stabbing”, said Israel Bachar, a 65-year-old who runs a nearby print shop.
Authorities spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said the attacker’s auto halted when it hit the motorist as well as another vehicle was captured.
The Beit Shemesh municipality said that it is “shocked and grief-stricken by the murder of the yeshiva student in the shooting attack at Gush Etzion”.
Thursday’s attacks brought to an end a very brief period of relative quiet, at least from the Israeli perspective; the most recent previous attack occurred last Friday when a Palestinian shot two Israelis dead near Hebron.
“A Palestinian terrorist stabbed two Israeli men who were injured critically and taken to hospital”.
Palestinian allegations that Israel was trying to alter the religious status quo at a Jerusalem holy site, known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary, where al-Aqsa mosque stands, and to Jews as Temple Mount, have partly fueled the violence.
The attacks have Israelis on edge. Several politicians have urged licensed gun owners to carry their weapons and there have been several bloody accidents.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has entered an emergency security cabinet meeting with top officials to discuss measures to combat the ongoing Palestinian attacks, which have been ongoing as part of what a few Palestinian radicals are calling the “knife intifada”. Critics, including a few Israelis, accuse Israel of practicing ethnic cleansing and apartheid in Palestine, pointing to the continuing expansion of Jewish-only settler colonies throughout the occupied territories and concurrent expulsion of Palestinian people, theft of Palestinian land and destruction of Palestinian homes as the cause of anti-Israeli terrorism.
The teenager, Tariq Abu Khdeir, of Tampa, Fla., was assaulted at a violent East Jerusalem protest following the killing of his cousin, Muhammad Abu Khdeir.
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Abu Khdeir’s attorney Mohammad Mahmoud said Thursday the ruling delivered an “extremely light” punishment that “gives (police) a free hand”. The volunteers had also visited a memorial for three Israeli teens who were killed last summer.
