Israeli Troops Kill Two Arabs in Street Battles

Israeli troops shot dead a Palestinian and wounded 92 Saturday during the fiercest street battles in the occupied Gaza Strip in more than a year, hospital sources said.

In a separate incident in the occupied West Bank late Saturday, soldiers shot dead a Palestinian activist who refused orders to halt, the army said.

The deaths brought to 971 the number of Arabs killed by Israelis during the five-year Palestinian uprising--125 this year.

Palestinian sources said troops used bullets, gravel-firing cannons and tear gas to disperse stone-throwing Arabs in demonstrations throughout the Gaza Strip.

They said soldiers killed Khaled Askari, 27, outside his barber’s shop in the Jabaliya refugee camp in the northern part of Gaza.

Witnesses said troops were shooting randomly at waves of stone-throwing demonstrators when Askari was hit.

An army spokeswoman confirmed the death and said one soldier and five paramilitary border police were injured in demonstrations in Jabaliya.

In the village of Bani Naim near the West Bank town of Hebron, troops opened fire on a group of armed, masked Palestinians when they refused soldiers’ orders to halt, the spokeswoman said.

“The soldiers then shot at them, and one, Hassan Hadur, 24, of Bani Naim was killed as a result.”

A curfew was imposed on the village after the shooting.

Israel had confined more than 400,000 of the 750,000 Gaza Strip Arabs to their homes and barred the rest from leaving the area Tuesday after three soldiers were killed in an ambush on the eve of the fifth anniversary of the Palestinian uprising.

In the pre-dawn hours of Saturday, the army lifted curfews in all but one of the Gaza Strip’s eight refugee camps.

Demonstrators streamed into the streets, many in anticipation of Monday’s fifth anniversary of the founding in Gaza of the Islamic fundamentalist Hamas movement, Palestinian sources said.

In Gaza City, intensive street battles erupted after soldiers tried to break up a march marking the anniversary.

A force of about 100 troops then clashed with hundreds of demonstrators in the city’s central Palestine Square.

Soldiers repeatedly fired live ammunition, rubber and plastic bullets and tear gas as crowds hurled stones, cement blocks and metal objects at them.