At least 16 Palestinians were wounded by Israeli army gunfire on Saturday after crowds briefly succeeded in opening the road between Ramallah and the university town of Bir Zeit, closed by the Israeli army for a week, witnesses said.
Israeli troops opened fire on crowds of hundreds of Palestinians who had formed human walls lining each side of the West Bank road, letting more than a score of vehicles pass through the Israeli checkpoint before the army intervened, they told AFP.
The checkpoint has been the scene of clashes since the army closed the road as part of a blockade of Palestinian areas imposed after a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv on June 1, with angry students protesting that they could not get to classes.
More than 1,000 Palestinians, some waving their national flag, had marched to the site from central Ramallah.
"It was a victory to open the road, but it only lasted four minutes," said Bir Zeit student Ahmed Maher, adding that he had exams on Monday and he did not know if he would be able to take them.
Members of the university administration, meanwhile, handed the Israeli troops a demand to open the road, accusing them of violating the fourth Geneva convention on the protection of civilians in times of war.
The university said that failing to open the road "will make you a criminal of war, and legal action will be taken against your government and against you personally."
Meanwhile, the Palestinian news agency, WAFA, said Israeli forces on Saturday arrested Bashar Abdul Latif Mohammad, a Bir Zeit University student from Burqa, near Nablus.
Mohammed, a Hamas member, is the head of the university’s student union, said AFP.
In another development, a large Israeli army unit on Saturday forcibly entered the village of Kufur Hares in the Salfit governorate, where the soldiers attacked residents and damaged property, according to WAFA.
The agency said that in the dawn attack, “the occupation soldiers got in houses, messed with properties and broke windows and gates.”
The village is under a tight siege and residents use hilly back roads to come and go.
Another village in the province, Burqeen, witnessed a similar attack, according to the agency.
Since the outbreak of the latest Israeli-Palestinian conflict last September, Reuters reports that Palestinians have killed approximately 88 Israelis with weapons ranging from stones and knives to machineguns and car bombs. The latest suicide bombing raises that toll by at least 20. Israeli military sources have reported well over 600 injuries to Israelis of Jewish descent.
In the same time period, according to CNN, Israeli soldiers and armed Jewish settlers have killed 13 Arab Israelis and 450 Palestinians with weapons ranging from machineguns and tanks to US-made Apache helicopter gunships and F-16s.
According to Amnesty International, nearly 100 of the Palestinians killed were children.
The Palestinian Red Crescent Society has reported over 14,000 Palestinians wounded.
Jewish author Noam Chomsky, who according to a New York Times Book Review article is “arguably the most important intellectual alive,” has been quoted as saying: “State terrorism is an extreme form of terrorism, generally much worse than individual terrorism because it has the resources of a state behind it.” – Albawaba.com
