At least 30 Palestinians were wounded Monday when Israeli tanks shelled areas in the Palestinian-controlled West Bank town of Hebron, reported the official Palestinian news agency, WAFA.
Witnesses told the agency that shelling damaged four positions of the Palestinian presidential guards unit, Force 17, as well as the headquarters of the communications ministry.
Israeli troops and tanks made a brief incursion into the Palestinian-controlled area, advancing between 500 to 1,000 meters (yards) from various directions. It was the second such incursion into Hebron in three days.
AFP cited Palestinian sources as saying that a 14-year-old died of a heart attack brought on by the assault.
The Israeli army justified the incursion by claiming that it was fired on from four Palestinian positions, AFP said.
"After repeatedly demanding the Palestinians to stop firing, the Israeli army attacked two of the four positions with soldiers and tanks," the army said in a statement.
The head of Palestinian preventative security in the West Bank, Jibril Rjoub, condemned the attacks on the official Voice of Palestine radio.
"These attacks must stop, it is the only way of restoring calm," he said.
Since the September 2000 eruption of the latest Palestinian uprising against 34 years of Israeli military occupation, the media has reported that Palestinians have killed over 123 Israelis with weapons ranging from stones and knives to machineguns and car bombs. Israeli military sources have reported well over 600 wounded Israelis of Jewish descent.
In the same time period, according to the UK newspaper The Guardian, Israeli soldiers and armed Jewish settlers have killed 13 Arab Israelis and 510 Palestinians with weapons ranging from machineguns and tanks to US-made Apache helicopter gunships and F-16s.
According to an Amnesty International early this year, nearly 100 of the Palestinians killed up to that point were children. In addition, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society has reported over 14,000 Palestinians wounded.
Jewish author Noam Chomsky, who according to a New York Times Book Review article is “arguably the most important intellectual alive,” has been quoted as saying: “State terrorism is an extreme form of terrorism, generally much worse than individual terrorism because it has the resources of a state behind it.” - Albawaba.com
