Israeli security forces arrest a young Palestinian during clashes after Friday prayer's in East Jerusalem
AFP/ Ramallah
Israeli troops shot dead a Palestinian teenager Friday that the army said was about to hurl a petrol bomb at Israeli motorists near the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah.
A spokeswoman said troops staked out at the village of Silwad to protect a major road widely used by Israeli settlers, spotted a person about to hurl a petrol bomb at traffic.
"The forces fired immediately to neutralise the danger... and confirmed a hit," she said.
Palestinian officials named the youth as Orwa Hammad, 17, saying he was shot during a stone-throwing protest against troops. This is a routine occurrence at Silwad, which lied near Ofra settlement.
Locals in Silwad said Hammad's father lives in the United States and that the youth held US citizenship.
US officials in Jerusalem could not immediately confirm those claims.
Earlier, police in annexed east Jerusalem clashed with Palestinians, firing tear gas to disperse stone throwing protesters.
They were deployed in force ahead of weekly Muslim prayers and restricted access to a flashpoint mosque, after a deadly Palestinian attack sent tensions soaring.
Nightly clashes
Nightly clashes have broken out since a Palestinian ploughed his car into a crowd of pedestrians on Wednesday, killing a baby and injuring six other people before he was shot dead by police.
The security presence was boosted across east Jerusalem including the Old City, police spokeswoman Luba Samri said.
Palestinian men under the age of 40 were not allowed into Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa mosque compound for Friday prayers because of fears of further unrest, she said.
The compound is the scene of frequent clashes between Palestinians and Israeli police.
The plaza houses the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa mosque, Islam's third-holiest site. It is also revered by Jews as the location of the biblical Jewish temples, considered Judaism's holiest place.
Prayers concluded on Friday afternoon with clashes in the Wadi Joz neighbourhood north of the Old City. Palestinians there threw stones and fired flares at police, who dispersed them and arrested three demonstrators, Samri said.
An AFP correspondent said undercover police in the crowd of Palestinians made the arrests.
There were also clashes in east Jerusalem's Issawiya neighbourhood, where AFP photographers saw police fire bursts of tear gas to break up a crowd of Palestinians who hurled rocks and burned tyres on the streets.
