A Palestinian boy was killed by Israeli soldiers who fired rubber-coated bullets near Jerusalem yesterday, said the Palestinian health ministry.
“Mohiyeh al-Tabakhi, 12, was killed by shots fired by occupation soldiers in the Al-Ram area near Jerusalem,” the ministry said in a statement.
The Palestinian suburb in the occupied West Bank near Jerusalem is cut off from the holy city by the “separation wall” built by Israel.
The boy was hit in the chest by a rubber-coated bullet which caused cardiac arrest, medical sources were quoted by the Palestinian news agency WAFA as saying.
Israeli police said tear gas grenades and sound bombs had been used against demonstrators in the area.
“After being pelted with Molotov cocktails, police used tear gas and stun grenades to disperse the protesters,” police spokeswoman Luba Samri said.
“There was no live fire,” she added.
Earlier yesterday, a Palestinian shot after stabbing two Israeli soldiers in the occupied West Bank died of his wounds, a hospital spokeswoman said.
Mustafa Baradeah, 51, lightly wounded the soldiers with a screwdriver before being shot, the army said.
He also had a knife in his possession.
Monday’s attack took place near Al-Arroub, north of the flashpoint West Bank city of Hebron.
Baradeah was taken in critical condition to Shaare Zedek hospital in Jerusalem where he died later, a spokeswoman there said.
His brother Ibrahim was killed in April after carrying out an attack with an axe that left a soldier lightly wounded.
Baradeah was from Al-Arroub refugee camp, located about half way between Bethlehem and Hebron, where many of the attackers in a recent wave of violence have come from.
Meanwhile, a Palestinian man has died after a tunnel collapse in the Gaza Strip, Islamic Jihad has announced, in the latest in a series of such incidents.
Salah al-Astal, 28, from Khan Yunis in southern Gaza, died while working in a tunnel, the Al-Quds Brigades, the Islamist movement’s military wing, announced in a statement late on Monday.
It said he had died during the “collapse of a resistance tunnel,” a term used by Islamic Jihad, Hamas and other Palestinian militant factions to refer to tunnels used in the conflict with Israel.
It was the second such death in 10 days, after another Islamic Jihad member died in similar circumstances on July 10.
Israel accuses militants in Gaza of rebuilding tunnels that could be used to attack it, with three wars having been fought between them since 2008.
A spokesman for the Al-Quds Brigades said yesterday they would continue to focus on tunnel building as it enables them to “hurt the enemy”.
Since January 26, at least 14 Gazans have been killed in at least seven separate tunnel collapses.
Israel and Egypt have both launched operations to try to prevent tunnelling.
Clashes broke out on the Gaza border in May as Israel revealed a new tunnel reaching into its territory from the Palestinian enclave, after another was discovered in mid-April.
That violence was the worst flare-up between the army and Hamas since a devastating 2014 war, with Hamas attacking forces operating nearby with mortar rounds and Israel responding with air raids and tank fire, which resulted in the death of a Gaza woman.
The Gaza Strip has been under an Israeli blockade for around a decade and its border with Egypt also remains largely closed.
Egypt has also destroyed Palestinian tunnels used to smuggle in commercial goods, cash, people and, allegedly, weapons.