Palestinians injured after clashes with Israeli troops

Gaza, July 4 (IANS) Dozens were injured during clashes between Palestinian demonstrators and Israeli troops in a protest in the West Bank against Israel’s annexation plan of the Jordan Valley, medical sources said.

The sources said that Israeli soldiers shot and wounded a Palestinian young man during the protest on Friday near the northern West Bank city of Nablus against building two Israeli settlement posts in the area, reports Xinhua news agency.

Ghassan Daghlas, a Palestinian Authority official who monitors settlement activities in the northern West Bank, told Xinhua that the Israeli army forces opened fire at dozens of Palestinian demonstrators and wounded one of them near Nablus.

Meanwhile, the Palestine Red Crescent Society said in a press statement that Israeli soldiers injured 15 Palestinians by rubber-coated metal bullets, in addition to dozens who suffered suffocation after inhaling tear gas near the northern city of Qalqilya.

Walid Assaf, head of the National Committee to Resist the Wall and Settlements, told Xinhua during the protest that the message of the Palestinian people is that they will “keep resisting the plans of settlement and annexations of Palestinian lands”.

“The peaceful and popular resistance will go on all over the Palestinian territories that Israel threatens to confiscate,” Assaf said, adding that the Palestinian people’s struggle “will go on until the end of the Israeli occupation”.

Also, the Gaza Strip-based Islamic Hamas movement organized on Friday a rally in the southern Gaza town of Rafah against the Israeli annexation plan.

Mansour Break, a senior Hamas local leader, told reporters that the local Palestinians joined the rally “to tell the world that they are sticking to resistance and the Israeli annexation plan will never pass”.

The government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has planned to annex Jewish settlements in the West Bank as well as the strategic Jordan Valley.

It is still unclear whether the Israeli government intends to follow through with the plans to apply Israeli law over contentious territories in the West Bank and to what extent.

–IANS

ksk/