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Israeli-Palestinian violence spreads

Soldiers fire on Gaza Strip protesters, killing six

By Joel Greenberg, McClatchy Foreign Staff
Published: October 9, 2015, 6:59pm
2 Photos
A Palestinian protester films with his cellphone Friday during clashes with Israeli soldiers on the Israeli border at Eastern Gaza City.
A Palestinian protester films with his cellphone Friday during clashes with Israeli soldiers on the Israeli border at Eastern Gaza City. (KHALIL HAMRA/Associated Press) Photo Gallery

JERUSALEM — A surge of Palestinian unrest punctuated by multiple stabbing attacks across Israel and in the West Bank spread on Friday to the Gaza Strip, where Israeli soldiers fired on crowds of stone-throwing protesters across a border fence, killing six, local health officials said.

The Israeli government has been struggling to quell a rash of seemingly spontaneous knife attacks by lone Palestinian assailants with no record of ties to militant groups.

There were more stabbings in Israel on Friday, including a revenge attack by an Israeli teenager that wounded four Arabs. Street clashes between Palestinian protesters and Israeli troops have flared in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, raising fears of a new popular uprising.

The Israeli defense minister, Moshe Yaalon, urged the use of lethal force against Palestinian assailants at a nationally televised news conference Thursday with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The proper response, he said, was to “bring about the liquidation of the terrorist stabber or attacker, the stone-thrower and the like, immediately and on the spot.”

On the border with the Gaza Strip on Friday, Israeli forces fired at crowds of young Palestinians who approached the border fence, hours after the Hamas leader in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, declared “the start of a new intifada,” or Palestinian uprising.

“Gaza stands beside the battle in Jerusalem,” Haniyeh said in a mosque sermon during Friday prayers. “Gaza is fully ready.”

The current wave of violence was triggered by clashes last month at the Al-Aqsa mosque compound, a contested holy site in Jerusalem’s Old City known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary.

According to a military statement, about 200 Palestinians hurled rocks and rolled burning tires at the Gaza border fence, and soldiers responded with gunfire at “the main instigators to prevent their advance and disperse the riot.”

Health officials in Gaza said that six Palestinians were killed and dozens more were wounded. Witnesses said the shots were fired by snipers at Israeli guard posts along the border fence, where Israel enforces a 100 meter-wide no-go zone inside the Gaza Strip.

The army statement did not explain why troops did not use non-lethal crowd control weapons.

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