GAZA/GENEVA: Three Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire in clashes on the Gaza border on Friday, the health ministry in the enclave said, in the latest day of demonstrations dubbed the Great March of Return. The ministry said two of the men, who it did not identify, were killed by Israeli fire east of Gaza City. An AFP correspondent saw both bodies at the Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.
A third man, identified by the ministry as 29-year-old Abdul Salam al Bakr, was killed east of Khan Yunis in southern Gaza.
The deaths brought the number of Palestinians killed since protests began on March 30 to 44.
154 other people were hospitalised for gunshot wounds and tear gas inhalation, Gaza’s health ministry said.
As on previous Fridays, protesters gathered at five sites near the border fence, though numbers were down on earlier weeks.
Marchers are demanding the right to return to their homes seized by Israel in 1948.
Israel says that allowing the refugees in would mean the end of the Jewish state, and accuses Gaza’s rulers Hamas of using the protests as a pretext for violence.
Israeli soldiers fired bullets and tear gas at thousands of protesters at the border on Friday, hours after the United Nations human rights chief criticised Israel for using “excessive force”.
On Friday, Israeli ground troops, holed up behind fortifications on their side of the 40 km border fence, fired live ammunition and tear gas at protesters at five locations on the Gazan side.
The Gaza health ministry said 60 were wounded by gun fire, including a Palestinian journalist who was hit with a bullet in his foot.
Dozens more, including four medics, were treated for gas inhalation, as Israeli forces showered the area with tear gas canisters from behind their fortifications.
Protesters hurled stones and rolled burning tyres towards the fence, and some attached cans of burning petrol to kites and flew them into Israeli territory.
Others cleared away barbed wire coils which Israeli troops had placed in Gazan territory overnight in a bid to create a buffer zone between protesters and the fence.
The protests come at a time of growing frustration for Palestinians as prospects for an independent Palestinian state look poor. Peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians have been stalled for several years and Israeli settlements in the occupied territories have expanded.
In a statement released earlier on Friday, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad al Hussein called the loss of life was “deplorable” and that a “staggering number of injuries” had been caused by live ammunition.
International law permits the use of lethal force in cases of “extreme necessity”, but it was hard to see how stones or Molotov cocktails thrown from a great distance at heavily protected security forces could constitute such a threat, Zeid said.
“It is difficult to see how children, even those throwing stones,
can present a threat of imminent death or serious injury to heavily protected security force personnel,” Zeid said.
United Nations’ warnings about excessive use of force appeared to have gone unheeded, with no change in Israeli tactics, and Israel only seem to carry out serious investigations when there was independent video evidence, he said. Otherwise there was little or no effort to apply the rule of law.
— AFP/Reuters
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