JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A Palestinian stabbed and critically wounded an Israeli soldier near a Tel Aviv train station on Monday, police said, as anti-Israel violence that has raised fears of a new Palestinian uprising in the making reached the country's business capital.

Israeli-Palestinian tensions have festered over access to a Jerusalem compound housing Islam's third holiest site and where biblical Jewish temples once stood. Stone-throwing protests have also erupted in several Arab towns in Israel since Saturday, when police killed an Arab youth who assaulted them.

A spokesman for the Magen David Adom ambulance service said the Israeli soldier, aged about 20, was rushed to hospital after Monday's stabbing in Tel Aviv. "I saw the terrorist, in a red shirt and jeans, running in the direction of Levanda Street ... I chased him, and came back and saw the soldier writhing on the ground," a witness said on Israel Radio.

Police said the attacker had stabbed the soldier several times and they arrested a suspect, a Palestinian from the town of Nablus in the occupied West Bank. They said the assault was apparently politically motivated.

Five days ago, a Palestinian rammed his car into pedestrians in central Jerusalem, the second such incident of its kind in as many weeks, killing two Israelis. Police shot the driver dead.