Palestinian militants terrorized Israel with a series of deadly attacks Tuesday that left 12 Israelis and an American dead in the city of Jaffa near where United States Vice President Joe Biden was visiting with the former leader of the Middle Eastern nation — according to local authorities.

This from the Washington Post:

The Jaffa assault came as Biden arrived on a two-day visit as part of a regional tour of the Mideast. He is to meet both Israeli and Palestinian leaders and there have been speculations he would try to revive the moribund Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

Police spokeswoman Luba Samri said the man killed in Jaffa was an American tourist, but further details were not immediately available. A dozen Israelis, civilians and police officers, were wounded in the Palestinian knife and gun attacks.

Along with the Jaffa attacker, three other Palestinian assailants were shot and killed in the day’s rash of violence, the latest in a wave of near-daily Palestinian assaults on Israeli civilians and security forces that erupted in mid-September.

The VP was meeting with Shimon Peres at the Peres Center for Peres, just a few blocks away from the senseless bloodshed.

“I notified the Vice President on the terrible incident that took place just a few hundred meters away from here in Jaffa,” Peres said. “Terror leads to nowhere.”

More from the Post:

In other attacks Tuesday, a Palestinian opened fire at police officers near Jerusalem’s Old City in the late afternoon, about a half hour before Biden arrived in Israel, wounding an officer before fleeing the scene. In the chase that followed, the Palestinian wounded another officer before he was shot and killed, police said.

A short while before that, a Palestinian followed an Israeli into a store and stabbed him in the neck in the central city of Petah Tikvah before he was shot and killed.

Earlier in the day, a Palestinian woman in her 50s who tried to stab Israeli security forces was shot and killed by officers, also in Jerusalem’s Old City, police said. No Israelis were wounded in that attack

Stay tuned to the blog for more on this developing story.