Israeli forces have brutally suppressed anti-settlement protests in the occupied West Bank, leaving a Palestinian teenager killed.
The Palestinian Red Crescent said Mohammad Said Hamayel, 15, succumbed to wounds he sustained when Israeli troops shot him on Sobeih Mountain in Beita town, south of the occupied West Bank city of Nablus, on Friday.
According to Wafa news agency, some 95 Palestinians were also injured during the anti-settlement demonstration, 11 of whom with Israeli live ammunition.
The Israeli army called it “a violent riot with hundreds of Palestinians”.
To the east of Nablus, more people were also injured when Israeli forces attacked Palestinians taking part in a protest against the construction of a settlement outpost in the village of Beit Dajan.
The wounded included eight people, who were hit with rubber bullets, and dozens who suffered breathing difficulties due to inhaling tear gas used by Israeli forces.
Also on Friday, Israeli forces fired tear gas at Palestinians’ homes as they attacked a weekly anti-settlement protest in the village of Kafr Qaddum in the West Bank, leaving a baby girl suffering breathing difficulties.
More than 600,000 Israelis live in over 230 settlements built since the 1967 Israeli occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem al-Quds.
All Israeli settlements are illegal under international law as they are built on occupied land. The United Nations Security Council has condemned Israel’s settlement activities in the occupied territories in several resolutions.
In the West Bank village of Silwad, tens of suffocation cases were also reported when Israeli forces fired tear gas at Palestinians demanding the return of bodies of martyred countrymen that are kept by Israel.
Wafa says Israeli keeps the bodies of 315 Palestinians, 235 of them in the infamous “cemeteries of numbers”, which are made up of mass graves marked with numbers rather than names, and 80 others in freezers.
According to human rights organizations, holding bodies and remains of the dead contravenes the principles of international humanitarian law.
In Jerusalem al-Quds, Palestinians on Friday staged a rally to express solidarity with Palestinian families threatened with eviction from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood.
Weeks of Israeli harassment of Palestinians in Jerusalem al-Quds and attempts to appropriate Palestinian lands in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood were followed by the Israeli bombardment of the besieged Gaza Strip.
The Israeli aggression on Gaza, which began on May 10, killed over 250 Palestinians and wounded more than 1,900 others, before a ceasefire came into effect on May 21.