Published Sunday, August 11, 2013

Updated 6:00 pm: Israeli troops shot an unarmed Palestinian dead on the border with Gaza on Saturday night, sources on both sides said.

The victim, identified at Hussein Awadallah, was killed east of al-Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip, a health service official told AFP.

He added that the body had been returned to the Gaza Strip.

The Israeli army said the man had been seen behaving suspiciously in an area close to the border fence.

“Later on, he began crossing the fence with a suspicious object in his possession,” a spokesman told AFP on Sunday.

A military source said that he was subsequently found to be unarmed.

Family mourn the killing of Hussein Awadallah by Israeli forces in Gaza. (Photo: AFP – Mahmoud Hams)

On Sunday afternoon, Palestinian medical sources said another Palestinian was shot east of Gaza City when the Israeli army opened fire at citizens near the border fence.

An Israeli military spokeswoman told AFP that a group of Palestinians had approached a fence enclosing Gaza in the north of the isolated strip where “they began meddling with it while hurling rocks.”

After requests “to stop and step back,” the soldiers “fired warning shots in the air” and when the Palestinian still “failed to comply,” the troops “resorted to firing toward the lower extremities of the key instigators.”

A security source said the Palestinian was “lightly injured.”

(AFP)