Palestinian Stabs 3 Israelis, Is Captured : Unrest: Shamir expresses regret that the 21-year-old Arab was taken alive. It was the sixth such attack this year.

A Palestinian shouting “God is great!” stabbed three Israelis in a crowded downtown shopping district Friday before enraged passersby captured and beat him, continuing the cycle of violence that has plagued the city in recent months.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir said he was sorry that the 21-year-old Arab, a resident of East Jerusalem, was taken alive.

“This is very grave, this criminal act which took place on the main streets of Jerusalem again. To my regret, the perpetrator was captured alive, and this hurts me very much,” Shamir told state-run Israel Radio.

It was the sixth such stabbing this year in a wave of Jewish-Arab violence that began after Israeli border police in October shot and killed 20 Palestinians and wounded more than 100 others in a confrontation on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. It came just a day after Secretary of State James A. Baker III left Israel at the end of his latest Middle East peace mission with little progress to report toward an Arab-Israeli settlement.

A radical Palestinian group from the Israeli-occupied territories, Islamic Jihad, claimed responsibility for the attack, alleging in a pamphlet that the stabbings were to protest “American projects.”

“We have to fight this and use all means so these acts will be stopped,” Shamir said. “It is not a problem which has a solution. It is a matter of awareness and caution.”

The three Jews injured in the attack, two men and a woman, were reported in good condition, but witnesses said the attacker was bleeding heavily when bystanders turned him over to the police. Groups of Israelis watching the melee were shouting, “Hang the Arabs!”

Police said the incident began at mid-morning when Jerusalem’s Street of the Prophets, lined with small shops, was crowded with shoppers before a long Jewish holiday weekend.

The attacker, carrying a dagger with a double-edged blade, first stabbed 30-year-old David Zilber in a supermarket near Davidka Square and then rushed along a crowded sidewalk on Street of the Prophets shouting “ Allahu akbar! “ (God is great), according to Israel Television. He then is said to have attacked a 27-year-old woman, Yehdit Ben-Saadon, and attacked Moshe Cohen, a Jewish seminary student.

Cohen said he was stabbed when he ran up and kicked the attacker after he saw the man stab Ben-Saadon.

“He fell down and then got up and came at me shouting, ‘ Allahu akbar ,’ ” Cohen said. “He stabbed me in the back and then went on.”

Bystanders gave chase, pursuing the man up the street and into a supermarket. At one point, a taxi tried to run over the man, who was finally knocked down in a parking lot and beaten and kicked, witnesses told state-run Israel Radio.

“We tore him apart with blows,” said a man who claimed to have participated in the pursuit, and another reported, “I grabbed a big stick and ran after him.”

Witnesses said a Jewish settler from the Israeli-occupied West Bank pulled out a gun and attempted to shoot the attacker, but the gun jammed and he hit the man over the head with it instead.

The bloodied assailant was bandaged by other bystanders before being handed over to police, who took him to the hospital, the radio reported. Police said two Israeli police officers were attacked by the crowd when they tried to intervene during the pursuit and hustle the man into a police van. One of the officers suffered a broken arm.

The assailant’s name was not immediately released, but Jerusalem Police Chief Chaim Albades said he was a resident of predominantly Arab East Jerusalem, and added, “The motive is nationalist.”

In a similar incident in March, four women were stabbed to death by a Palestinian man just before Baker’s first visit to the region on his current round of peace talks.

On April 30, a 63-year-old French tourist was stabbed to death in a restaurant restroom in Bethlehem, sparking further alarm about already declining tourism in the Holy Land and concerns about possible Arab-Christian unrest. City leaders have condemned the attack, which they described as an isolated incident. Bethlehem’s Christian Arab mayor has denied that there have been orchestrated Arab attacks on Christian targets.

Twelve Israelis were the targets of the six stabbing attacks this year; six of them died.