A Palestinian baby boy died yesterday after choking on teargas fired by Israeli forces, Palestinian officials said, as new knife attacks and clashes shook Jerusalem and the West Bank.
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The Palestinian was shot and killed at a checkpoint between the West Bank and Israel when he tried to stab a border guard, police said.
Clashes broke out between Palestinian stone throwers and Israeli soldiers as the funerals began.
Israeli police said security forces “saw a Palestinian armed with a sharp object” approaching them. An officer then ordered one of his men driving a jeep to hit the assailant who was “seriously injured”. The Israeli military has angrily rejected the accusations, saying that “outrageous, unsubstantiated and anonymous claims have become a knee-jerk Palestinian response in a reality where Israelis have been stabbed, slashed, shot, butchered and run over in recent weeks”.
This month’s surge in violence, the worst since the 2014 Gaza war, arose in part from religious and political tensions over the al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem’s walled Old City that is sacred to both Muslims and Jews. The two “talked about the situation at Al-Aqsa mosque, the living conditions in Gaza, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, and made a decision to be shahids (martyrs)-to be killed in the battle for Islam by way of committing a stabbing attack in an effort to kill Jews”, the indictment said.
Palestinians accuse Israel of seeking to change the rules governing the site, although Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted he will not alter a status quo that forbids Jews from praying there.
Maliki added that “examples of cases that have really occurred in the last 40 days of Israeli aggression against innocent Palestinians around occupied territory” were also included in the document.
Palestinians say Israeli police and soldiers are using excessive force, while Israel says lethal force is justified against deadly threats.
Also on Saturday, former USA president Bill Clinton was to address a rally in Tel Aviv in memory of Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli premier assassinated 20 years ago by a rightwing Jewish extremist.
Thousands of Palestinian mourners on Saturday attended the funerals of the five teenagers, two of whom were girls, in the southern West Bank city of Hebron, a powder-keg in the decades-old Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
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Yesterday, dozens of protesters outside the site, known to Muslims as the Ibrahimi Mosque, condemned restrictions on access imposed by Israel, which has split it into a mosque and a synagogue.
