JERICHO, Palestinian Territories —
Israeli occupation forces shot and killed a Palestinian Tuesday while storming a
refugee camp in the occupied West Bank.
اضافة اعلان
The Palestinian health ministry said 20-year-old
Ahmed Ibrahim Oweidat “succumbed to critical wounds sustained by live bullets
to the head, at dawn today in Aqabat Jaber camp” near Jericho.
Two other men were wounded by live fire when the
“undercover” forces raided the camp overnight, the official Palestinian news
agency Wafa said.
Israeli forces said in a statement to AFP that
soldiers had conducted an overnight “counterterrorism” operation in Aqabat “to
apprehend wanted suspects”.
Mounting death toll
Clashes between Israeli forces and Palestinians are common in the West
Bank, a territory occupied by Israel since 1967, but recent weeks have seen a
surge in violence.
Oweidat is among 25
Palestinians and Israeli Arabs
killed by Israeli forces since late March.
His body, wrapped in the Palestinian flag and that
of the president Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement, was driven from a Ramallah
hospital to Jericho for his burial, where hundreds of mourners enduring 38°C
surrounded the Oweidat family home. As the body left the family home, Oweidat’s
mother wailed as she gave her son a final embrace.
Violent clashes have also recently rocked the
Al-Aqsa Mosque complex in Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem, sparking fears of
another armed conflict after an 11-day war last year by Israel on Gaza.
Following the Al-Aqsa violence, there was isolated
rocket fire towards Israel from Gaza, prompting Israeli reprisals. No injuries
have been reported on either side as a result of the rocket fire or retaliatory
air strikes.
Gaza workers
Israel on Saturday had
closed the Erez crossing with
Gaza in retaliation for the rocket fire, blocking
the 12,000 Palestinians with permits to enter Israel from going to work.
But Erez reopened
Monday “following a security assessment,” Israel’s defence ministry said,
warning that a sustained opening was conditioned on “the continued preservation
of a stable security situation”.
No rockets have been fired from Gaza since Saturday
morning.
Concerns of fresh
Al-Aqsa clashes are building,
though, ahead of Friday prayers at the complex, with the end of Ramadan also
approaching in early May.
Palestinian Muslims have been angered by an uptick
in Jewish visits to the Al-Aqsa Mosque complex, Islam’s third-holiest site. It
is also Judaism’s holiest place and known to Jews as the Temple Mount.
In an apparent attempt to ease tensions, Foreign
Minister Yair Lapid told reporters Sunday that Israel was committed to the
“status quo” at Al-Aqsa, meaning an adherence to long-standing convention allowing
Jews to visit the complex but not pray there.
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