British Activist Critically Wounded in Gaza

A British citizen was in critical condition in southern Israel on Friday night after suffering a massive head wound in what appeared to be the second shooting of an international activist by Israeli troops in less than a week.

Tom Hurndall, 21, of Manchester, England, was shot as he tried to hurry a group of children to safety during sporadic firing from an Israeli observation tower on the border with Egypt in the southern Gaza Strip, witnesses said.

Members of the pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement, to which he belonged, said they had gathered in the area to build a tent to block an army tank route.

“He went to help some children, to get them away from there,” said fellow ISM activist Laura Gordon, who was with Hurndall when the shooting began.

When she looked around again, she said, he was lying in a pool of blood.

Gordon said Hurndall had joined the group just a few days earlier after a two-week stint as a human shield in Iraq. She said that when he was shot, he was wearing an orange reflective vest that clearly identified him as an international activist.

“I cannot pronounce him dead, but he’s in a very critical condition,” said Dr. Ali Mousa, director of Abu Yousif Alnajar hospital in Gaza.

Hurndall was later airlifted to an Israeli hospital in Beersheba. An ISM spokesman said he had been declared brain-dead.

Israeli military sources said a senior field commander had been dispatched to investigate the incident.

Hurndall’s shooting came just five days after ISM activist Brian Avery, 24, of Albuquerque, suffered a gunshot wound in the face while walking in the West Bank city of Jenin. Friends said that Avery was recovering in an Israeli hospital but that he would need extensive surgery to reconstruct his jaw and nose.

The group said an Israeli armored personnel carrier shot at Avery and another activist as they stood in the street with their hands in the air; a spokesman for the Israeli security forces said troops in the area had not reported injuring any civilians but had shot to disperse four youths making crude bombs nearby.

The shootings followed the death of yet another American ISM volunteer, Rachel Corrie, 23, of Olympia, Wash., last month.

The group’s first foreigner to be killed, Corrie was crushed to death as she tried to obstruct a mammoth D-9 bulldozer, used by Israel to demolish Palestinian homes and to sift the ground for antitank mines.

ISM has gained a reputation in Israel for practicing an intense and controversial brand of activism aimed at highlighting human rights abuses by Israeli forces operating in occupied Palestinian territories.

Besides dismantling Israeli checkpoints and helping ambulance drivers to negotiate Israeli roadblocks, the group’s volunteers oversee Palestinian youths throwing rocks at rifle-toting soldiers and venture into the streets of Gaza and the West Bank during military curfews to investigate firefights.

Most of the group’s international volunteers come from Europe and the United States. They pay for their own tickets to the Palestinian territories, plus food and phone cards, and they vary from seasoned activists to students fresh out of college and self-styled poet-philosophers.

The Israeli army says the activists are meddling in a conflict that is not their own.

“We don’t need any international organization telling us how to fight this battle,” said Maj. Sharon Feingold of the Israel Defense Forces in an interview before Hurndall’s shooting. “This is not a football field.”

For their part, ISM activists say their tactics are based on the hope that Israeli troops are less likely to shoot at innocent civilians if they are present.

Gordon, who was yards away from Hurndall when he was shot, said she planned to stick with her ISM work for the time being.

“We’re all reassessing,” she said. “If they shoot at us and we just leave, that would set a dangerous precedent for other activists working here.”

Friday’s shooting capped a week of resumed Israeli strikes against Islamic militants after a relatively calm period at the beginning of the U.S.-led war on Iraq.

Also Friday, Israeli helicopters fired at least one missile into the Khan Yunis cemetery in Gaza.

The military branch of the militant group Hamas said in a statement that the missile was meant to destroy an Israeli spying device that militants discovered there.

Israeli missile strikes killed two top Islamic leaders earlier in the week.

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Special correspondent Fayed Abu Shammalah in Gaza City contributed to this report.