WEST BANK/GAZA: Palestinian demonstrator badly injured during a weekly demonstration against Israel's controversial barrier

Record ID: 560920

  • Title: WEST BANK/GAZA: Palestinian demonstrator badly injured during a weekly demonstration against Israel's controversial barrier
  • Date: 23rd May 2009
  • Summary: MEDICAL TEAM AND DEMONSTRATORS ASSISTING WOUNDED DEMONSTRATOR MEDICAL TEAM GIVING FIRST AID TO WOUNDED PALESTINIAN YOUTH WOUNDED PALESTINIAN BEING EVACUATED ON TRUCK
  • Embargoed: 7th June 2009 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Topics: International Relations,Domestic Politics
  • Reuters ID: LVA789GGAF1KDT849ROFII65AJQ2
  • Story Text: A Palestinian youth was seriously wounded on Friday (May 22), after being hit in the head by a tear-gas canister during an anti-barrier demonstration at the West Bank village of Nilin.
    The youth was being treated on the spot and later evacuated from the scene, as other demonstrators were clashing with Israeli forces.
    The Israeli Army spokesperson unit said that 400 demonstrators were violently rioting and were hurling rocks at the soldiers who responded with riot dispersal means. The army spokesperson unit reported two wounded rioters.
    In the West Bank village of Bilin, dozens of demonstrators marched from the village towards the construction site of the separation barrier and confronted Israeli soldiers who fired tear gas at them.
    Israeli Army spokesperson unit said that 80 rioters took part in the demonstrations and hurled stones at the Israeli soldiers who then responded by using riot dispersal means.
    The barrier in Bilin cuts some 3 km (2 miles) into the village, separating some farmers from their fields.
    Israel has said that the barrier, a mix of electronic fences and walls that encroaches on West Bank territory, is meant to keep suicide bombers out of its cities.
    Palestinians call the barrier - the course of which encompasses Israeli settlements in the West Bank - a disguised move to annex or fragment territory Palestinians seek for a viable state.
    The World Court in The Hague ruled in 2004 that Israel's building of the barrier was illegal.
    In the Hamas-run Gaza Strip, funeral procession for two Islamic Jihad militants killed earlier in the day by Israeli soldiers took place in the streets of Rafah.
    An army spokesman said troops entered the enclave before dawn near Kerem Shalom border crossing and shot the two, whom they suspected of planning an attack. He said the Palestinians had opened fire and soldiers found explosives on their bodies.
    The Islamic Jihad militant group, an ally of Hamas, said the two gunmen were members of its military wing.
    The incident came three days after Israeli warplanes bombed targets in the Gaza Strip in response to a rocket fired from the Palestinian territory towards an Israeli town.
    Cross-border violence has been rare since a three-week war ended in mid-January. Israeli forces killed more than 1,400 Palestinians, hundreds of them civilians, in an offensive they said was intended to stem rocket attacks on Israeli towns.
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