At least nine people have been injured on a bus in central Tel Aviv – four seriously – in a knife attack by a Palestinian man who was then shot and arrested while trying to escape.

The attack – which police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said was being treated as a terrorist incident – took place at about 7.15am on a No 40 bus crowded with commuters during the rush-hour.

There were conflicting reports about the number of people injured. Police said 13 were hurt in total. The Magen David Adom ambulance service said seven were wounded in the stabbing – four of them seriously – and two other passengers suffered injuries while running off the bus. Other passengers attended hospital with trauma symptoms, the ambulance service said.

Palestinian and Israeli security sources identified the attacker as Hamza Muhammad Hasan Matrouk.

According to Israeli police, Matrouk boarded the bus on Menachem Begin Road and stabbed the driver in the chest after the vehicle had travelled about 400 metres from the stop. The driver was identified as 55-year-old Herzl Biton.

Despite being stabbed Biton managed to call a colleague at the bus company Kasis Matsliach. Matsliach told Israel radio that Biton said to him: ‘Matti, Matti, a terrorist is on my bus, save me. He severely injured me. I’ve been stabbed all over. He stabbed the passengers. I am next to Ma’ariv headquarters now. He severely injured me. I am bleeding. I am going to die. Save me. Save me. And if something happens to me, watch over my children.’”

Pictures of the weapon used in the attack showed a large kitchen knife. Its blade had been bent and its wooden handle broken off. Video footage of the attack - obtained by Israel’s Channel 10 - depicted a scene of panic around the bus as the attacker was visible running after some of those fleeing and apparently stabbing a woman in a blue coat who is then seen falling to the ground.

Rosenfeld said Matrouk was in custody and undergoing questioning. Police said he confessed to the stabbing, entering Israel from the West Bank on Wednesday morning and adding that he carried out the attack in response to last year’s Gaza war and tensions surrounding a Jerusalem site holy to Jews and Muslims.

A vehicle ferrying prisoners to a court hearing was following the bus and officers pursued Matrouk as he fled into a nearby street, where he was shot in the leg and arrested.

Speaking to army radio, one of the prison service officers involved, identified as Benny Botershvili, said: “We saw the bus swerve to the side … then stop at a green light. Suddenly, we saw people running out of the bus and when we saw them shouting for help, we jumped out [of our vehicle] and I and three others started running after the terrorist. At first we fired in the air, then at his legs. The terrorist fell, we handcuffed him and turned him over to police.”

Moses Collins, who was in a bus behind, described seeing Biton’s bus swerving in the road then stopping before a man got off and ran. As passengers on Collins’s bus got off, they could see injured passengers covered in blood.

Hamas, the Islamist group that controls the Gaza Strip, did not claim responsibility but praised Wednesday’s attack as “brave and heroic” in a tweet by Izzat Risheq, a Hamas leader residing in Qatar.

The stabbing was a “natural response to the occupation and its terrorist crimes against our people”, Risheq said.

The incident took place after a period of relative calm following a summer and autumn marked by violence in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories.

The Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, blamed Hamas and the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, known as Abu Mazen. “The terrorist attack in Tel Aviv is the direct result of the poisonous incitement being disseminated by the Palestinian Authority against the Jews and their state. This same terrorism is trying to attack us in Paris, Brussels and everywhere,” he said.

“It is Hamas – Abu Mazen’s partners in a unity government – that hastened to commend this attack. This is the same Hamas that announced it will sue Israel at the international criminal court in The Hague. Abu Mazen is responsible for both the incitement and the dangerous move at the ICC in The Hague.”

The stabbing is the latest in a series of “lone-wolf” attacks in Israel in recent months. About a dozen people have been killed in Palestinian attacks, including five people attacked with guns and meat cleavers in a bloody assault on a Jerusalem synagogue.

Most of the violence has occurred in Jerusalem, though there have been other attacks in Tel Aviv and the West Bank. In Jerusalem, the violence followed months of tension between Jews and Palestinians in east Jerusalem, the section of the city the Palestinians demand as their future capital.

The area experienced unrest and near-daily attacks by Palestinians after a wave of violence last summer, capped by a 50-day war between Israel and Hamas militants in Gaza.