Palestinians clash with Israeli police at Hebron burials

Violence broke out on Saturday in the flashpoint West Bank city of Hebron as Palestinians buried five teenagers killed in a wave of attacks and clashes with Israeli forces.

The funerals came as Israeli border guards shot dead a suspected Palestin-ian knife attacker at a checkpoint between the West Bank and Israel after he tried to stab one of them, the police said.

Thousands of Palestinian mourners gathered for the funerals of the five teena-gers, including two girls, in Hebron, a powder-keg in the decades-old Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

They waved Palestinian flags and chanted “we will die but Palestine will live on”.Palestinian medical sources said 12 Palestinians were wounded by Israeli fire.

Israeli security forces on Saturday shot and killed a Palestinian who ran at them with a knife in the occupied West Bank on Saturday, the police said, as a month-long wave of violence showed no signs of abating. An Israeli police spokeswoman said that at a checkpoint in the northern West Bank a Palestinian holding a knife ran toward a security officer who called on him to stop.

“When he did not heed those calls the security man shot toward him in order to neutralise him and as a result the terrorist was killed,” spokeswoman Luba Samri said. Palestinian medical officials said he was 18-years-old.

October’s surge in violence, the worst since the 2014 Gaza war, arose 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 Palesti-nian allegations that Israel is violating a “status quo” under which non-Muslim prayer there is banned.

Israel says such allegations are false.Since the latest unrest, at least 65 Palestinians have been shot dead by Israelis. Of those, 38 were assailants armed mainly with knives, Israel said.