Gaza, October 03: Israeli paramilitary border police killed a Palestinian who violently resisted arrest on Sunday after entering East Jerusalem from the occupied West Bank without a permit, a police spokesman said.
The 37-year-old man, a resident of the West Bank city of Hebron, was shot while trying to grab a policeman’s pistol in the confrontation before dawn, the spokesman said.
An Israeli human rights group said the man appeared to have been killed after he first tried to flee.
Jerusalem is at the core of the Middle East conflict, with Palestinians seeing its eastern section as capital of a state they hope to found in the adjacent West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Israel captured East Jerusalem from Jordan in the 1967 war and calls the whole city its capital, a status not recognised abroad. After an armed Palestinian revolt erupted a decade ago, Israel erected a barrier that takes in much of East Jerusalem.
Karim Jubran of the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem said the Palestinian was among several undocumented labourers who had slipped across the barrier in hope of finding employment.
“After they crossed the fence, they came across a patrol car. They fled. The deceased was the last to flee. He was shot once by a border policeman,” Jubran told Israel Radio, citing witness testimony gathered at the scene.
—Agencies