Israeli Occupation Forces Shoot Dead Teenager, Wound 30 in Nablus Peace Activists Protest Apartheid Wall in Qalqilya, 13 Injured

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Israeli Occupation Forces Shoot Dead Teenager, Wound 30 in Nablus; Peace Activists Protest Apartheid Wall in Qalqilya, 13 Injured

Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) on Saturday shot dead a Palestinian teenager, wounded at least 30 other people in clashes with stone throwers and demolished a house in the West Bank city of Nablus, while they threw teargas and smoke grenades in Qalqilya at demonstrators protesting against the Israeli Apartheid Wall the Jewish state is building on occupied Palestinian land.

IOF fatally shot seventeen-year-old Raed Rayan while confronting occupation troops who have been stepping up house-to-house searches in Nablus since Thursday.

Palestinian witnesses said Rayan was shot in the back and later died after a crowd of youths began throwing stones at an Israeli tank. Seven other Palestinians were lightly wounded, they said.

Thirty others were wounded by live fire or rubber-coated steel bullets, Palestinian sources added. Six of the wounded Palestinians were shot by live ammunition and 11 by rubber-coated steel bullets in several clashes, witnesses and medics said.

IOF troops early Sunday demolished the home of Hashem Abu Hamdan, one of the Al-Aqsa Brigades commanders in the Balata refugee camp.

Abu Hamdan -- considered a senior Fatah activist in the West Bank, whom IOF accuses of being responsible for dozens of attacks in Israel -- was not in his home at the time of the demolition.

IOF have been besieging and imposing a strict curfew on Nablus and the adjacent Balata refugee camp for more than a week, calling the city a “hotbed of terrorist activity.”

IOF officials claimed the Nablus invasion came n response to a bombing in Tel Aviv, which rendered four Israelis, three of them soldiers, dead.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), one of several Palestinian groups waging a three-year-old uprising against the 36-year-old Israeli occupation, claimed responsibility for Thursday’s bombing, calling it revenge for the IOF’s killing of three activists in the Nablus raid last week, two of whom were PFLP members.

Separately, IOF troops threw teargas and smoke grenades at demonstrators in the northern West Bank town of Qalqilya, who were protesting against the Apartheid Wall the Jewish state is building on occupied Palestinian land.

Medics said 13 protestors were treated for smoke inhalation. Witnesses said one person was wounded slightly in the head by a rubber-coated steel bullet fired by IOF troops.

IOF said they used smoke grenades to disperse the crowd when people started climbing on the Wall, but they had not fired any bullets.

More than a thousand Palestinians were joined by foreign peace activists in a demonstration Saturday in Qalqilya against Israel’s Apartheid Wall, a day after troops fired on a similar protest with live bullets and injured two Israeli and American activists.

The protestors brandished banners urging an end to construction of the “Apartheid Wall.” The Wall takes the form of a concrete wall snaking around Qalqilya.

IOF fired teargas and rubber-coated steel bullets to disperse the crowd after they had been the target of stone-throwing, according to an AFP photographer at the scene.

Gustav Fridolin, a member of the Swedish parliament from the Green Party, told the crowd they should oppose the barrier through peaceful means.

“I came here to participate in the demonstration and to show people here that they are not alone, there are European politicians and people that think building the wall is madness,” Fridolin told The Associated Press.

An Israeli pacifist and an American activist were wounded by IOF gunfire Friday during another protest against the Wall involving some 400 Palestinians and 150 foreign activists in the village of Masha southeast of Qalqiliya.

In a separate clash in the nearby village of Masha, the IOF shot a 13-year-old boy twice in the stomach and seriously wounded him, Palestinian witnesses and medical workers said.

The Wall includes a concrete wall encircling much of Qalqiliya, making it difficult to enter or exit the town of 37,000 people located just across the West Bank border with Israel.

In the West Bank town of Bethlehem, around 50 foreign activists also staged a protest against the Wall on Saturday.