Israeli forces, Palestinians clash throughout West Bank

Reuters/Ramallah

Israeli forces clashed with Palestinian protesters throughout the occupied West Bank yesterday, capping a week of violence amid a hunger strike by four Palestinians in Israeli jails.

Tension and anticipation is rising in the West Bank a month before US President Barack Obama is due to visit Jerusalem and Ramallah, though he has announced no concrete plans to revive Israeli-Palestinian peace talks stalled for three years.

From the precincts of Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque, youths threw stones at Israeli police after Friday prayers.

Dozens of Israeli officers briefly entered the politically sensitive compound. Witnesses said officers fired tear gas and threw percussion grenades at the demonstrators as bystanders and elderly worshippers ran for cover.

The old city of Hebron, a bitterly contested city in the southern West Bank sown heavily with Israeli settlers, echoed with percussion grenades hurled by Israeli forces at some 1,500 Palestinian protesters.

At a military checkpoint near the northern city of Nablus and outside a military prison in the central West Bank, Israeli forces worked to clear away makeshift roadblocks and fired rubber bullets towards stone-throwing Palestinians.

The status of four hunger-striking Palestinian detainees was in limbo as Israeli civilian courts failed to rule definitively in hearings held for two of them this week, referring their multi-decade sentences back to military courts.

Israel convicted the men of taking part in  attacks and freed them along with hundreds of other prisoners in a 2011 swap for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier held in Hamas-ruled Gaza for five years, only to re-arrest them soon afterward.

Lawyers and officials representing the men, who were accused by Israel of violating the terms of their release, say their cases are locked in a legal maze and Palestinian officials hope Egyptian mediation could convince Israel to free them.