Hebron: Violence broke out Saturday in the flashpoint West Bank city of Hebron as Palestinians buried five teenagers killed in a wave of attacks and clashes with Israeli occupation forces.
The funerals came as Israeli occupation soldiers shot dead another Palestinian at a checkpoint between the occupied West Bank and Israel claiming he tried to stab one of them, police said.
The surge of unrest since early October has triggered fears of a third Palestinian intifada, or uprising, against Israeli occupation by a generation gripped by despair and anger over stalled peace efforts.
66 Palestinians and nine Israelis have been killed since a wave of attacks and violent clashes broke out a month ago in occupied Jerusalem.
The violence has spread to the West Bank, with daily attacks on Israeli soldiers and protests, and also to the Gaza Strip where demonstrators have clashed with Israeli forces along the borders of the blockaded coastal enclave.
Thousands of Palestinian mourners gathered for the funerals of the five teenagers, including two girls, in Hebron, a powder-keg in the decades-old Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
They waved Palestinian flags and chanted “we will die but Palestine will live on”.
Clashes broke out between Palestinian stone throwers and Israeli occupation soldiers as the funerals got underway.
One Palestinian was buried separately in Israeli-occupied east Jerusalem while another was laid to rest late Friday in the West Bank town of Jenin.
The Israeli regime has started withholding the bodies of Palestinians shot dead by Israelis as a punitive measure to collectively punish Palestinians for the ongoing violence.
However, on Friday the Israeli regime said it had released the bodies of seven Palestinians, apparently to ease tensions.
Ziad Natsheh, who buried his son Tareq, 17, in Hebron on Saturday, said as he received condolences from mourners that he was relieved to give him a “dignified burial”.
“Living in a country where there is nothing else but war, everyone expects to know death, injury or lose a child,” said Natsheh.
Many of the attackers who have targeted Israeli occupation forces come from the southern West Bank city of Hebron, a stronghold of the Islamist movement Hamas.
Hebron is a city of 200,000 Palestinians but the presence of 500 Israeli colonists near the city centre, protected by barbed wire, watchtowers and a buffer zone patrolled by the army, has kept tensions high.
Simmering tensions boiled over in September over the status of Al Haram Al Sharif in occupied Jerusalem, before spiralling into a series of violent attacks from October 1.
Palestinians accuse the Israeli regime of seeking to change the rules governing the site. Under a status-quo agreement, Jews are allowed to visit the site but not perform religious rituals. Colonists however have raided the holy site several times over the past month and performed prayers, angering Palestinians who say Israel has plans to Judaise occupied east Jerusalem and Al Haram Al Sharif.
