Dubai: A Palestinian was killed in an overnight Israeli military raid in the Qalandiya refugee camp near Ramallah in the West Bank, medical and regime sources said on Tuesday.
The 21-year-old Mahmoud Adwan was killed when occupation troops entered the camp to make an arrest, triggering clashes with residents, the sources said.
The regime’s army confirmed that its special forces had launched a raid on the camp and claimed that its troops responded when they came under fire.
It added in a statement that one of the “terrorists” had been hit while a spokeswoman said she did not know whether or not he had been killed.
Witnesses said residents of Qalandia refugee camp threw stones at the Israeli soldiers and the man Adwan was watching from the roof of his home when he was shot.
He was dead on arrival at Palestine Medical Complex in Ramallah, with a bullet wound to the head, sources at the complex said.
Last week a Palestinian minister died after a confrontation with Israeli police in the West Bank.
The incident came with tensions running high in the occupied territories after months of unrest, and follows the death of a senior Palestinian official last week in a confrontation with Israeli troops.
According to an AFP tally, around 20 Palestinians have been killed since June in Israeli army operations in the West Bank.
Meanwhile, regime police on Tuesday arrested 10 members of extremist anti-Palestinian group Lehava which has been linked to an attack last month on a Jewish-Palestinian school.
“Ten suspects, members of the Lehava organisation, have been arrested for questioning following incitement and calls for racist acts of violence and terror,” Israeli police said in a statement.
Among those detained was the head of Lehava, which saw three of its members arrested last week on suspicion of torching a classroom at the Hand-in-Hand school, a rare symbol of coexistence in Occupied Jerusalem.
The November 29 attack saw the classroom badly damaged and slogans including ‘Death to Arabs’ and ‘There’s no coexistence with cancer’ scrawled on the walls in Hebrew.
Lehava activists follow the teachings of the late Meir Kahana, a virulently anti-Arab rabbi whose Kach party was banned by the Israeli regime, and its members fight against intermarriage.
Kahana was murdered in New York in 1990, but his ideology still inspires loyalty among Jewish extremists.
— With inputs from agencies
