GAZA CITY, 15 April 2004 — Hundreds of Palestinians staged demonstrations at the entrance to the Erez border crossing into Israel yesterday to denounce severe security measures imposed by the Israeli authorities, witnesses said.
Some of the protesters hurled stones in the direction of Israeli soldiers who responded by firing tear gas during what was the second consecutive day of protests at the crossing, in northern Gaza.
According to the Palestinian labor union, the protest had been organized to denounce the restrictions and “humiliating” inspections that Palestinians wanting to cross over into Israel or work in a cross-border industrial zone are subjected to.
Israeli soldiers injured more than 20 protesters with rubber bullets yesterday during stone-throwing confrontations at a controversial West Bank barrier, Palestinian medics and witnesses said.
The army said soldiers used “riot control means” to quell disturbances by hundreds of protesters who hurled stones at troops guarding construction workers near the village of Biddo, northwest of Jerusalem.
Khaled Ayyash, head of the Biddo clinic, said some 22 people were injured by rubber bullets. Three needed treatment, including a 14-year-old who was shot in the head and a man who was hit in the neck.
Palestinians, Israelis and foreign activists joined the protest against the barrier.
Meanwhile, Palestinian student was accidentally shot dead by one of his fellow protesters during a demonstration at a university in Gaza City in support of prisoners held by Israel, witnesses and medics said.
Ali Samih Amer, 25, was fatally wounded when a member of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an offshoot of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement, fired into the air during the protest at the Gaza’s Al-Azhar university.
The protest had been organized to mark Palestinian Prisoner’s Day, which falls on Saturday and the anniversary of the detention of Marwan Barghuti, Fatah’s leader in the West Bank, who was arrested by Israel on April 15, 2002, on a string of terrorism charges.
Further protests are expected to be held in the Palestinian territories today to mark the two events. A two-hour general strike is expected to be observed in Gaza on Saturday.
Around 7,500 Palestinians are currently held in Israeli prisons including 378 aged between 12 and 18 and 186 women.
In Nablus yesterday, the Israeli army destroyed the home of a Palestinian involved in a suicide attack, security sources said.
The house of Sabiah Abu Saud, who lightly wounded an Israeli soldier when he blew himself up by an army post near Qalqilya last November, was destroyed in a controlled explosion, security sources said.
