GAZA CITY: Hamas on Saturday condemned the fatal shooting by Egyptian border guards of what they said was a Palestinian minor on the Gaza border.

“We condemn the killing (Friday) of the child Zaki Al-Houbi by Egyptian army gunfire on the borders...“What happened is not appropriate to neighborly relations between brothers,” the organization said in a statement.

An Egyptian security official said that troops opened fire on Gazans who had illegally crossed into the Egyptian Sinai, where the army has created a buffer zone to prevent the movement of militants.

“Soldiers charged with protecting the frontier fired at six Gazans, of whom three succeeded in returning to Gaza while three were arrested. One was probably hit by the fire,” an official said.

Gaza emergency services spokesman Ashraf Al-Qudra said that Houbi was 17 years old.

He was killed in the Gaza frontier town of Rafah by Egyptian soldiers firing from across the border, Qudra said. The border troops shot the youth “in the back and the bullet settled in the heart. He died on the spot,” he told AFP.

He was the first Palestinian “to have been killed in a long time” along the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt, according to Qudra.