BDnews24: Israeli troops killed two Palestinians and wounded scores of others taking part in weekly Gaza border protests on Friday, medics said, as Egyptian mediators tried to clinch a truce deal that would calm the impoverished enclave.
In Jerusalem’s Old City, another area that Palestinians want for a future state, Israeli police said they shot dead an Arab who attacked them with a knife after leaving a mosque complex. After a more than four-month surge in confrontations over the Gaza Strip border, Israel this week eased its clampdown on the enclave’s commercial traffic and fishing. Cairo said it was finalising details of a longer-term accommodation between Israel and the dominant Palestinian Islamist group Hamas.
Some 20,000 people participated in Friday’s protests, which took place a few hundred meters from the fence, though dozens came closer, with some rolling burning tyres, witnesses said.
Medics said Israeli gunfire killed two men and wounded at least 270 other Palestinians, 50 of them with live bullets.
An Israeli army spokeswoman said troops had responded with “riot-dispersal means” to prevent breaches of the border.
Friday’s deaths brought to 170 the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces since the weekly protests began on March 30. The campaign is pressing for rights to land that Palestinians lost to Israel in the 1948 war of its foundation, and for an end to the Israeli-Egyptian blockade of Gaza.
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