Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Bloodbath on Gaza border Israeli army shoots at Palestinian protesters
GAZA-ISRAEL BORDER: At least 12 Palestinians, including a teenager, were killed and hundreds injured by Israeli security forces confronting one of the largest Palestinian demonstrations along the IsraelGaza border in recent years.
The protest coincided with Good Friday and the start of the Jewish holiday of Passover, a period that sees heightened security in Israel. Gaza health officials said one of the dead was aged 16 and at least 750 people were wounded by live gunfire, while others were struck by rubber bullets or treated for tear-gas inhalation.
The violence came after tens of thousands of Palestinians, pressing for a right of return for refugees to what is now Israel, gathered at five locations along the fenced 65km frontier where tents were erected for a planned six-week protest. The Israeli military estimate was 30 000 protesters.
The military said more than 100 army sharpshooters had been deployed in the area and earth- moving vehicles piled up dirt mounds to stop any attempt to breach the barrier.
Palestinian f amilies brought their children to the encampments just a few hundred metres from the Israeli security barrier with the Hamas Islamist-run enclave, and football fields were marked in the sand.
But later hundreds of Pal- estinian youths ignored calls from the organisers and the Israeli military to stay away from the frontier, where Israeli soldiers across the border kept watch. The military said its troops had used “riot dispersal means and firing towards main instigators”. Some demonstrators were “rolling burning tyres and hurling stones” at the border fence and at soldiers.
At least two of the dead were Hamas operatives, an Israeli military official claimed.
Palestinian health officials said Israeli forces used mostly gunfire against the protesters, in addition to tear gas and rubber bullets. Witnesses said the military had deployed a drone to drop tear gas.
The protest was launched on “Land Day”, an annual commemoration of the deaths of six Arab citizens of Israel, killed by Israeli security forces during demonstrations over government land confiscations in northern Israel in 1976.
But its main focus was a demand that Palestinian refugees be allowed the right of return to towns and villages that their families fled, or were driven out of, when the state of Israel was created in 1948.
The Israeli military accused Hamas of “cynically exploiting women and children, sending them to the security fence and endangering their lives”.
Major-General Eyal Zamir, head of Israel’s southern command, said his forces had identified “attempts to carry out terror attacks under the camouflage of riots”. Hamas had earlier urged protesters to adhere to the “peaceful nature” of the protest.
Israel has long ruled out any right of return, fearing an influx of Arabs that would wipe out its Jewish majority. It argues that refugees should resettle in a future state the Palestinians seek in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza. Peace talks to that end have been frozen since 2014.
The protest is scheduled to culminate on May 15, the day Palestinians commemorate what they call the “Nakba”, or “Catastrophe”, when the Israeli state was created.
There were also small protests in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and about 65 Palestinians were injured.
In Gaza, the protest was dubbed “The March of Return” and some tents bore names of the refugees’ original villages in what is now Israel.
At one Gaza protest site, Mansi Nassar, 80, walked towards the frontier with the aid of his cane, disregarding entreaties to remain 700m from the barrier. “I was born in Beit Darras inside Palestine and I will accept no less than returning to it,” he said, referring to his former home village south of the modern Israeli city of Ashdod. The village no longer exists. – Reuters/ African News Agency (ANA)