Israel: Palestinian holding hostages at Turkish Embassy

TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A Palestinian took hostages in the Turkish Embassy in Tel Aviv Tuesday after shots were fired outside, Israeli police and a Foreign Ministry official said, in an incident that appeared to have only an indirect link to recent tensions between the two countries.
Turkey's news agency said embassy security guards captured the attacker. The report quoted anonymous officials from the embassy. Israeli officials could not confirm the report.
"This is a hostage situation," Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor told the Associated Press before the Turkish news agency report, identifying the attacker as Nadim Injaz, a West Bank Palestinian who tried to seek asylum at another embassy four years earlier.
Channel 2 TV played a recording of a phone call it said came from the attacker. "I have two hostages," he said in Hebrew. "I will blow up the embassy."
A lawyer told Israel Radio, however, that the hostages, the consul and his wife, had escaped.
In his call to Channel 2, Mr. Injaz went on, "If they don't let me leave this country now I will burn down the whole building. I will burn everything. I will burn the cars, the doors I will break down the doors. I will break everything."
He said he was demanding asylum and protection from "these murderers the Zionists, the murdering Jews." At the same time, he said that Palestinian leaders, including President Mahmoud Abbas, "should die."
Israel's relations with Turkey have been strained in the wake of the Israeli attack on a Turkish flotilla heading for Gaza on May 31, when nine pro-Palestinian activists were killed, and many Palestinians have expressed support for Turkey.
Turkey withdrew its ambassador from Tel Aviv in the wake of the attack on the flotilla. Israel Radio reported from the scene that rescue workers with stretchers tried to enter the seaside embassy compound but left without bringing out any wounded.
The radio report said Turkish officials were not allowing Israeli police or rescue workers to enter the embassy.
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