Palestinians clash with Israeli forces in West Bank day of rage

Palestinian youths clash with Israeli forces across the West Bank cities on Friday (October 30) after Palestinian political factions called for a day of rage.

In the West Bank city of Ramallah violent clashes erupted between Israeli troops and Palestinian youths where nine demonstrators were wounded by rubber bullets, Palestinian medics said. Four medics were pepper-sprayed.

A Palestinian tried to stab an Israeli paramilitary police officer near Ramallah before fleeing, Israeli media reported. He was pursued by a military vehicle and run over, Ynet news agency reported. The extent of his injuries was not immediately clear.

Israeli troops fired tear gas grenades toward Palestinian youths who were throwing stones and Molotov cocktails at them in Bethlehem, another part of the West Bank.

In the West Bank city of Hebron Israeli troops sprayed Palestinians with skunk liquid and fired tear gas to stop them from throwing stones.

Knife-wielding Palestinians attacked Israelis in Jerusalem and the Israeli-occupied West Bank earlier on Friday and one assailant was shot dead, police said, extending a wave of violence spurred in part by tensions over a Jerusalem holy site.

This month’s welter of violence, the worst since the 2014 Gaza war, has arisen in part from religious and political tensions over the al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem’s walled Old City that is sacred to both Muslims and Jews.

A growing number of visits by religious Jews to the al-Aqsa plaza – Islam’s holiest site outside Saudi Arabia and revered in Judaism as the location of two destroyed biblical temples – have stirred Palestinian allegations that Israel is violating a “status quo” under which Jewish prayer there is banned.

Israel has pledged to abide by the decades-old arrangement at the site and says false allegations by Palestinian officials, echoed in Arab social media, that it intends to encroach on Muslim rights of worship have been inciting violence.