LIVE BLOG: The Third Intifada - the unrest continues
Here's a summary of the latest developments as Israeli-Palestinians tensions rise:
- On Saturday three Palestinian teenagers, incluing one woman, were shot dead in theree separate incidents after reportedly attempting to stab Israelis in Hebron and East Jerusalem.
- Early Friday, hundreds of Palestinian youths attacked a site in Nablus - the exact target of the attack remains disputed
- A Palestinian man was shot dead in Hebron after stabbing and wounding an Israeli police officer
- Three Palestinian protesters shot dead by Israeli soldiers - two at the Gaza border and one in Nablus - with clashes between Palestinian protesters and Israeli security forces also reported in East Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Ramallah and Hebron. Another Palestinian who was shot in Gaza protests last week has died of his wounds.
- UN Security Council scheduled to hold an emergency meeting at 1500 GMT to discuss the upsurge of violence
- Israeli forces shot and injured three Palestinian protesters with live fire the central occupied West Bank city of Bethlehem on Friday, while one young man was shot with a rubber-coated steel bullet in his eye and is in moderate to serious condition.
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As night began to fall on Ramallah and the Beit El settlement hundreds of protestors continued to march in the streets, MEE contributor Elia Ghorbiah on the ground said.
She said that protests first began to march from the Albeira Mosque in the southern entrance of the city near the flashpoint Beit El settlement.
According to Ghorbiah live fire was fired into the crowd that threw stones at Israeli soldiers. At least 12 Palestinians were injured, including nine who were hit with live ammunition, medical sources said.
A young protestor told MEE: "There is no other option but this, we have no freedom; we have no peace we are confined to this situation. Palestine will be free by us and with our street resistance."
Israeli forces shot and injured three Palestinian protesters with live fire the central occupied West Bank city of Bethlehem on Friday, while one young man was shot with a rubber-coated steel bullet in his eye and is in moderate to serious condition.
More than 500 young men and women showed up for the protest, which quickly turned into clashes with Israeli forces based behind a large garage-like door in Israel’s separation wall that hems the city. The protest, which began just after noon, lasted for more than eight hours, with demonstrators still clashing well after nightfall.
Protests in Bethlehem have taken place every day since 2 October, and have resulted in two deaths, one of which was a 13-year-old boy who was shot and killed by Israeli forces.
On Friday, the demonstration started with young men and women gathering on one of the main streets in the area in front of Israel’s separation wall. Protesters began throwing rocks at the wall, and Israeli forces immediately responded with the first shots of tear gas.
As the protest escalated young men gathered loose wood, trash cans and scrap metal, positioning the piles in the middle of the street to create makeshift barriers that protesters took cover behind on the front line of the clashes.
Other young men and women stationed themselves in a half constructed building near the separation wall, using the proximity to hurl stones and Molotov cocktails over the wall.
“That is the best position,” one young man, who, like most of the protesters wore, a checkered Palestinian scarf wrapped tightly around his head and face, said.
“Sometimes we have it and sometimes the soldiers take it, but right now we have it,” he said with a smile to his voice.
As other protesters lit tires on fire to create a smoke screen of thick billowing smoke on the main road, others in the half-constructed building dropped a Molotov cocktail on a pile of rubbish bellow, setting it ablaze.
Palestinian Authority firefighters soon responded, with every intention of putting out the fire, but protesters quickly put a stop to any attempts, screaming “go back!” at the first responders and throwing rocks at the two vehicles who quickly turned around and left the scene.
Israeli forces shot copious amounts of tear gas during the clashes, with dozens suffering from tear gas inhalation.
Medics at the scene told Middle East Eye that they’d treated more protesters for tear gas inhalation on Friday than they had on any other day since the start of October, when the daily clashes began.
As night fell, protesters carried at least a dozen tires and set them ablaze at the front line of the clashes, creating large piles of the burning rubber while yelling taunts at Israeli forces and screaming “God is great.”
The last of the demonstrators only left the streets when the rest of the tires burned out, with protesters promising they would be returning the next day.
Following the call from Hamas and Islamic Jihad for a “day of rage”, thousands of Palestinians in Gaza Strip have protested along the border with Israel on Friday. Two Palestinians have been shot dead by Israeli forces, and one who was injured by Israeli forces last week has died of his wounds, local media has reported.
Regularly for the past week, dozens, sometimes hundreds of people have been gathering in the border area, east of the Shujiaiya neighberhood in Gaza City, reaching as close as 50 meters from the border fence.
On Friday, after the noon prayers, people started to gather at entrance of a road leading to the border area where protests have been taking place. Despite the earlier call for demonstrations, local security forces tried to prevent people from demonstrating near the border fence in eastern Shujjaiya. “We are not stopping anyone from protesting. But we are concerned for the safety of our citizens. Since additional Israeli soldiers have been placed along the border, especially in Nahal Oz area, we tried to convince people to go protest in other places” said the head of a nearby checkpoint, who introduced himself as major Abu Ahmed. Despite the road block, groups of young man reached the border through another route and few hours later the road was re-opened.
“We stopped relaying on stone throwing 15 years ago. Now, more efficient way of resistance are rockets,” Abu Ahmed added. But young man who took part in Friday protests seemed to disagree. “We cannot remain silent, when our people are being killed in the West Bank and Jerusalem” said Mahmoud Masoud, 22-year-old from Jabalia refugee camp. He joined dozens of people who reached the border areas through fields, north of the usual place of demonstrations. “This time it's not about Gaza, it's an act of solidarity” he said, adding that being injured or shot is absolutely a worthy sacrifice. As he was speaking, Israeli soldiers, hiding behind a mound of dirt started shooting tear gas at sparsely gathered protesters.
“We hope that our protests will force the Israelis to think twice before shooting someone in the West Bank,” 19-year-old Ali told Middle East Eye, standing roughly 200 meters from the fence, near the Israeli kibbutz of Nahal Oz . He was accompanied by 18-year old Amir Salim, who has been already injured in his chest and leg during the Tuesday protests in the same place and insisted on coming back.
While thousands of people gathered along the road, only a few hundred stood at the fence. Israeli soldiers shot tear gas, rubber-coated steel bullets and live ammunition at the protesters.
At the main hospital in Gaza city, Shifa, dozens of people awaited news on their injured relatives. Umm Ramzi, a middle-aged woman from Shujiaiya, told MEE she was there, because her teenage son, Zakariya was shot in his leg. After an hour of waiting at the door of the hospital, where ambulances kept on arriving with more and more injured, the mother still did not know how serious was her son's medical condition. “I would never stop him from protesting, not even after he got injured. This is our fate. We live in a country of protests” she added. The family has more than one reason to protest – Um Ramzi's husban was shot by an Israeli soldier during the second intifada, which left him permanently disabled. During the 2014 Israeli offensive on Gaza Strip, their family home in Shujjaiya was bombed.
According to statements released by the spokesperson of Health Ministry in Gaza, Ashrif al-Kidra, as of 5:35 pm there were nearly hundred injuries and two people were killed: Yehiya Abdel Qader Farahat and Mahmoud Hatem Hamida. Farahat was shot during the protest at Erez border crossing and Hamida – in eastern Shajjaiya.
Israeli soldiers and a settler shot dead two Palestinians who tried to stab Jews in separate incidents in annexed East Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank on Saturday, the army and police said.
In the first attack at just before 0600 GMT, 18-year-old Fadel al Qawasmeh tried to stab an Israeli settler in the centre of the West Bank city of Hebron.
The settler responded by opening fire on andk killing Qawasmeh the army said, adding that the Palestinian had tried but failed to wound the Jewish man.
Minutes later in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem, a second Palestinian was shot and killed by Israeli forces when he tried to stab a soldier at a checkpoint, police said.
He has yet to be identified.
A 17-year-old protestor in Nablus in the West Bank, who asked to go by the name Jihad, told Middle East Eye that it was the “Jews” who were the “danger”.
“Abu Mazen [Abbas] only talks, but we do,” Jihad said. “We wish he would put on his army uniform and come join us here on the streets, where we are taking up the honourable struggle until we finally succeed."
A group of Palestinian journalists has released a statement claiming that an unnamed student, who they said had attended school at the site attacked in what was thought to be an arson attack on the Joseph's Tomb holy site this morning, was involved in the burning of the Dawabsha family home in the village of Duma near Nablus on 31 July. These claims could not be verified.
Palestine's top diplomat at the UN asked the Security Council on Friday to consider providing international protection for Palestinians under Israeli occupation.
Riyad Mansour told an emergency session that the Council must "shoulder its responsibility in maintaining international peace and security" and "urgently intervene to end this aggression".
"We call upon you once again ... to deal seriously and urgently with the question of providing international protection for our people," he said.
Palestinian ambassador to the UN Riyad Mansour, has called on the international community to step in to protect Palestinian civilians in the occupied territories.
"The escalations mean that the conflict will become a religious one. We need to make Israel responsible for its illegal violations of international law and human rights law," Mansour told a special session of the UN Security Council in New York.
He went on to call for an end to "collective punishment" such as the closures around East Jerusalem and home demolitions, which are being carried out against Palestinians accused of carrying out attacks.
Mansour then urged the Security Council to honour past resolutions, which called for international protection for Palestinian citizens living under occupation, the disarmament of settlers and the deployment of international observers. The measures were approved in 1994 after the mass shooting at the Ibrahim mosque in Hebron in which 29 Palestinians were shot dead by a Jewish settler.
The Temporary International Presence in Hebron mission currently only monitors the situation in the flashpoint West Bank town.
Reports are emerging that a second Palestinian has been killed in Gaza following clashes on the border with Israeli security services. According to medical sources in Gaza, 90 people have also been injured - up from less than 30 only a few hours ago.
Photojournalist and MEE contributor Faiz Abu Rmeleh on the ground in East Jerusalem:
"Citizens are complaining about the collective punishment policy [of the closures and restrictions]. Not only because of the closure, but because they have led to huge traffic within neighbourhoods, especially in the mornings and the afternoons; the time when students, workers and employees go back home."
"Moreover, they say they are annoyed by the provocative inspection of individuals in the city [by Israeli security services]. Women and children have not been exempted from them. Individuals are getting stopped and their IDs are being taken. Men are being asked to raise their clothes and in some cases, take them off - in addition to the shoes - in front of other passers-by. This happens without taking the feelings [of those being searched] into account. Women’s bags are being strictly checked."
Russia Today is broadcasting scenes live from Bethlehem clashes.
Check out the coverage here:
Medical sources in Gaza told Maan news agency that 27 protestors have been injured in Gaza following clashes with Israeli forces.
An Israeli army spokesperson told Maan that hundreds of Palestinians had gathered near the border and had attempted to breach the buffer zone.
Protests have been rocking Bethlehem for the last few hours, with Israeli police firing tear gas and rubber bullets and protestors throwing stones.
Live fire has also been reported. Three protestors are said to have been injured.
Here are some images emerging on social media:
Israeli courts have ordered the continued detention of an Israeli teen, who went on a stabbing spree last week and injured four Palestinians in Dimona, a town in northern Israel.
The suspect’s attorney, told the court that his client had severe mental problems and that he should be submitted to further psychiatric observations.
After his arrest, the suspect whose name cannot be released because he is a minor, said that he had carried out the attack because “all Arabs are terrorists”.