A car plowed into a group on a street near a popular bike and walking path on a Tel Aviv promenade. The driver was shot dead by a nearby police officer when he tried to pull a gun, police said.
American tourist, Spencer, saw some of what happened.
"We heard gunfire, we saw shots and then we saw people sprinting across the street, and then we heard sirens, and we decided it was time to get out of here."
An Israeli security source identified the assailant as an Arab citizen of Israel from the town of Kafr Qassem.
The Magen David Adom ambulance service said the victims were all foreign tourists.
Earlier on Friday, two Israeli sisters, aged 20 and 16 with joint British nationality, were killed and their mother wounded in a shooting attack on their car near the Jewish settlement of Hamra in the Jordan Valley.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the site of the attack, saying, "Our enemies are putting us to the test again."
The attacks, after a night of cross-border strikes in Gaza and Lebanon, added to heightened Israeli-Palestinian tensions following Israeli police raids in Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa mosque earlier this week.
The tensions threatened to spiral into a wider conflict overnight as Israel responded to a barrage of rockets by hitting targets linked to the Islamist group Hamas in Gaza and southern Lebanon.
But the fighting entered a lull on Friday.
However, the two attacks underlined how volatile the situation remains after successive nights of trouble.
No claim of responsibility was made for either of Friday's attacks, but Hamas, the Islamist group that controls the blockaded Gaza Strip, praised them and linked them to the tensions around Al-Aqsa mosque.
Twice this week Israeli police have raided the mosque, where hundreds of thousands of worshippers have been praying during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, to dislodge groups they said had barricaded themselves with the aim of causing trouble.
The site in Jerusalem's Old City, holy to both Muslims and Jews, who know it as Temple Mount, has been a longstanding flashpoint.
