Hamas security forces on Saturday evening attacked members and leaders of the rival Fatah faction who came to offer condolences over the death of Mohammed Ayoub, 14, in clashes Friday between Palestinian demonstrators and IDF soldiers along the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel.

The attack came after a verbal altercation erupted between Hamas and Fatah members at the tent in Gaza City, set up by the Ayoub family to receive condolence calls over the death of their son.

Hamas security officers later dismantled the tent and ordered all those present to leave immediately, a source in the Gaza Strip said.

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A senior Fatah operative, Abed Al Majdalawi, was lightly injured during the Hamas raid, the source added.

It was not immediately clear what had triggered the verbal altercation between the representatives of the two rival parties. However, such confrontations have become commonplace in various parts of the Gaza Strip since Hamas violently seized control of the coastal enclave more than 10 years ago.

Sources close to Hamas accused Fatah of seeking to exploit the death of the boy “to score political points.” The sources claimed that Fatah activists who came to offer condolences over the death of the boy tried to convince his family to make statements in support of Fatah leader and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

Atef Abu Seif, a spokesperson for Fatah in the West Bank, condemned what he called the Hamas “assault” on the Ayoub family’s mourning tent.

The “assault,” he said, “contravened all traditions of national work and was in violation of Palestinian national values.

“Fatah had the honor of sacrificing three martyrs last Friday,” Abu Seif continued. “We condemn what Hamas did against the family of martyr Mohammed Ayoub and call on all Palestinian factions to assume their responsibilities in order to put an end to these irresponsible actions.” </s> GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) — The Latest on developments related to Gaza protests (all times local):

The Hamas militant wing is suggesting that a Palestinian engineer and lecturer shot dead in Malaysia was one of its commanders.

The armed wing of Hamas has opened a mourning house in Gaza Saturday for Fadi al-Batsh.

A main banner at the entrance of the tent described al-Batsh as a member of the military wing and "a commander."

Ten masked militants in camouflage uniforms stood in a line outside the tent in Jabaliya, the slain man's hometown, to greet mourners. The ceremony is typical for senior Hamas commanders.

A photographer says a Palestinian teen who was killed by Israeli army fire was dozens of meters (yards) from the Gaza border fence when he was hit by a bullet.

Gaza health officials have identified Mohammed Ayyoub, either 15 or 14 years old, as one of four Palestinians killed Friday by Israeli troops firing from across the fence in the fourth round of weekly Hamas-led protests near the border.

Photographer Abed Alhakeem Abu Rish said Saturday he saw the teen standing about 150 meters (164 yards) from the fence. He says Ayyoub was about to take cover behind a low sand berm when he was shot and fell to the ground.

Abu Rish's photographs show the teen as he collapses head first and then lies motionless in the same spot.

The European Union has urged the Israeli military to "refrain from using lethal force against unarmed protesters," after four Palestinians, including a teen-age boy, were killed by army fire in protests along Gaza's border with Israel.

In Saturday's statement, the European Union's diplomatic service called for a full investigation of Friday's shootings.

Friday marked the fourth round of weekly mass border protests, led by Gaza's ruling Hamas group.

The marches are aimed, in part, at breaking a border blockade of Gaza enforced by Israel and Egypt since 2007, when the Islamic militant group seized the territory, a year after winning Palestinian parliament elections.

Since late March, 32 Palestinians were killed and more than 1,600 wounded by Israeli army fire in these protests, according to Gaza health officials.

Israel's defense minister says Gaza's Hamas rulers are the "only culprits" in the death of a Palestinian boy who was killed by Israeli army fire in protests on the Gaza-Israel border.

Avigdor Lieberman alleged on Twitter that Hamas uses women and children as human shields. His comments Saturday came after a top U.N. envoy in the region, Nikolay Mladenov, said it is "outrageous to shoot at children" and demanded an investigation.

The Israeli military has not commented on the killing of Mohammed Ayyoub. Gaza health officials initially gave his age as 15, but a local rights group, citing official documents, said he was 14.

Ayyoub was one of four Palestinians killed Friday by Israeli army fire in the fourth round of weekly border protests led by the Islamic militant Hamas.

Health officials say Israeli soldiers firing from across a border fence have killed four Palestinians, including a 15-year-old boy, and wounded more than 150 others as several thousand people in blockaded Gaza staged a fourth round of weekly protests on the border with Israel.

Huge black plumes of smoke from burning tires engulfed the border area on Friday. Some of the activists threw stones toward the fence or flew kites with flaming rags dangling from their tails.

The latest deaths brought to 32 the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli troops in protests since late March. More than 1,600 have been wounded by live rounds in the past three weeks, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. </s> Hundreds of colleagues and friends have attended the funeral of a popular and widely respected Palestinian video journalist who was killed as he covered Friday’s mass border protests in the Gaza Strip.



Yasser Murtaja, 31, was shot despite wearing a flak jacket with clear press markings as he filmed in thick black smoke from burning tyres set alight by protesters in Khuzaa, east of Khan Yunis. He was one of at least nine Palestinians killed by Israeli fire at various points along the border during the day.

Friday’s deaths brought to 31 the total of Palestinians killed by Israeli fire in the past week.

Q&A What is the history of the Palestinian reconciliation efforts? Show Hide The two main Palestinian parties – the Fatah faction of Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas and the Islamist militant group Hamas – have run separate governments in the West Bank and Gaza respectively since 2007. The situation emerged after Hamas defeated Fatah in parliamentary elections in 2006. Fatah refused to recognise the result, leading to a near-civil war that saw Hamas push Fatah out of Gaza. Numerous attempts at reconciliation have ensued but the latest effort looks the most serious yet. The issue of who controls the borders and runs government ministries is a key test, not least in loosening the Israeli blockade on Gaza, imposed after Hamas took control.

Responsibility for land border crossings – in a coastal strip without a commercial sea port or airport – is crucial, as Palestinians and goods can only cross by these checkpoints. Both Egypt and Israel will want to ensure that no arms reach Hamas and other groups.

The Israeli military, which insists that it fires only at “instigators” involved in attacks on soldiers, said it was investigating Murtaja’s death. It added that its troops were “operating in accordance with clear rules of engagement” and that it did “not intentionally target journalists”.

Murtaja’s body, draped in a Palestinian flag, was carried from the principal al-Omari mosque in Gaza City to the cemetery. After the burial, freelance photojournalist Shadi al-Assar, described how his friend – who was married with a two-year-old son – had been standing with him about 100 metres from the border fence when he decided to go into the smoke to get a better shot.

“Some time later I saw some of the young guys carrying him out on a stretcher. I wanted to take a picture of it and then I realised it was Yasser, my friend.” He and others had removed the jacket and uncovered a small entry wound in his left side. “I thought it was a light injury,” said Assar. But Murtaja, who was taken by ambulance to Nasser hospital in Khan Yunis, died in the early hours of Saturday.

Time for peaceful resistance, says Gaza's new movement Read more

Assar, 35, added: “He was a good guy, always smiling and loved by everybody. He was very ambitious, always looking for a better shot.” Like many Gazans of his generation, Murtaja had never been out of the Strip.

One of the first journalists to use camera drones in Gaza, Murtaja founded Ain Media, a TV production company that has done work for foreign clients including the BBC and Al Jazeera English. Under a drone image of the Gaza port that he posted on Facebook, he wrote: “I wished I could take this photo from the sky, not from land. My name is Yasser Murtaja, I am 30 years old. I live in Gaza City. I have never travelled.”

Although Murtaja is understood to have been independent of all political factions, the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh attended his funeral. He said the weekly protests – described as the “Return March” – represented a “battle of truth and awareness. Yasser held his camera to direct the arrows of truth to convey the image of the besieged people.”

Death toll mounts as Palestinians protest at Gaza border Read more

The 31 deaths in the past eight days include 19 Palestinians who were killed in the previous mass demonstrations on March or died subsequently of their wounds, along with two armed militants shot dead by Israeli troops in a separate border incident.

Hamas has admitted that five of those killed on 30 March were members of its military wing, while Israel has said that 10 of the 19 dead were identified as belonging to Hamas or other factions.

The protests are expected to continue over the next month and scheduled to reach their climax in mid-May, when Palestinians commemorate the 70th anniversary of the nakba, or catastrophe, when more than 700,000 were driven out or fled their homes in what is now Israel during the war of 1948. </s> GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) - The Latest on developments related to Gaza protests (all times local):

Israel's defense minister says Gaza's Hamas rulers are the "only culprits" in the death of a Palestinian boy who was killed by Israeli army fire in protests on the Gaza-Israel border.

Avigdor Lieberman alleged on Twitter that Hamas uses women and children as human shields. His comments Saturday came after a top U.N. envoy in the region, Nikolay Mladenov, said it is "outrageous to shoot at children" and demanded an investigation.

The Israeli military has not commented on the killing of Mohammed Ayyoub. Gaza health officials initially gave his age as 15, but a local rights group, citing official documents, said he was 14.

Ayyoub was one of four Palestinians killed Friday by Israeli army fire in the fourth round of weekly border protests led by the Islamic militant Hamas.

Health officials say Israeli soldiers firing from across a border fence have killed four Palestinians, including a 15-year-old boy, and wounded more than 150 others as several thousand people in blockaded Gaza staged a fourth round of weekly protests on the border with Israel.

Huge black plumes of smoke from burning tires engulfed the border area on Friday. Some of the activists threw stones toward the fence or flew kites with flaming rags dangling from their tails.

The latest deaths brought to 32 the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli troops in protests since late March. More than 1,600 have been wounded by live rounds in the past three weeks, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. </s> GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) — The Latest on developments related to Gaza protests (all times local):

Israel’s defense minister says Gaza’s Hamas rulers are the “only culprits” in the death of a Palestinian boy who was killed by Israeli army fire in protests on the Gaza-Israel border.

Avigdor Lieberman alleged on Twitter that Hamas uses women and children as human shields. His comments Saturday came after a top U.N. envoy in the region, Nikolay Mladenov, said it is “outrageous to shoot at children” and demanded an investigation.

The Israeli military has not commented on the killing of Mohammed Ayyoub. Gaza health officials initially gave his age as 15, but a local rights group, citing official documents, said he was 14.

Ayyoub was one of four Palestinians killed Friday by Israeli army fire in the fourth round of weekly border protests led by the Islamic militant Hamas.

Health officials say Israeli soldiers firing from across a border fence have killed four Palestinians, including a 15-year-old boy, and wounded more than 150 others as several thousand people in blockaded Gaza staged a fourth round of weekly protests on the border with Israel.

Huge black plumes of smoke from burning tires engulfed the border area on Friday. Some of the activists threw stones toward the fence or flew kites with flaming rags dangling from their tails.

The latest deaths brought to 32 the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli troops in protests since late March. More than 1,600 have been wounded by live rounds in the past three weeks, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. </s> Share this article with Google Plus

The family of an 18-year-old Palestinian man who died in the Gaza border protests last week say he was unarmed and shot in the back as he ran away from the Israeli military.

As harrowing footage emerged of the moment the teenager was gunned down, his family spoke out to say he was not a member of Islamist militant group Hamas.

Abdel Fattah Abd al-Nabi was shot by an Israeli sniper in the back on Friday.

The video shows him running in no-man’s-land while carrying a tyre.

Metres away from reaching a crowd of people, his body crumples to the ground.

The Israeli Defence Force (IDF) defended its actions and has called the footage ‘Hamas propaganda’.

The IDF is said to have claimed the video has been edited and does not show al-Nabi’s potentially provocative actions before he was killed.

But the teenager’s family claim he was unarmed.

‘He had no gun, no Molotov, a tyre. Does that harm the Israelis, a tyre?’ his brother, Mohamed al-Nabi, 22, told the Washington Post.

‘He wasn’t going toward the Israeli side. He was running away.’

Officials said another man was killed by Israeli gunfire in Gaza on Tuesday, Palestinian medics said, raising the death toll from clashes along the border to 19.

Israel’s defence minister, Avigdor Lieberman, yesterday said that the military will not change its tough response to Hamas-led mass protests near Gaza’s border with Israel, warning that those who approach the border are putting their lives at risk.

The planned six-week intermittent border protests are expected to escalate again this Friday, with many anticpiating more bloodshed.

The Palestinians’ ambassador at the United Nations, Riyad Mansour, appealed to the U.N. Security Council for immediate international protection for Palestinian civilians, especially in Gaza.

He charged in a letter to the council that Israel has adopted ‘a shoot-to-kill policy’ during what he called peaceful protests.

The international group Human Rights Watch accused Lieberman and other senior Israeli officials of unlawfully calling for the use of live fire against Palestinian protesters who posed no imminent threat to life.

Last Friday, thousands of Palestinians marched near the border fence between Israel and Gaza, with families setting up camps several hundred meters from the front line.

Smaller groups moved closer to the fence, throwing stones, hurling firebombs or burning tires.

Israeli troops were lined up on the other side of the fence, including snipers perched on high earth embankments overlooking Gaza.

Palestinian health officials have said 18 Palestinians were killed on that day, making it the bloodiest day in Gaza since the 2014 war between Israel and Hamas.

More than 750 Palestinians were wounded by Israeli fire, according to Gaza health officials, with others claiming the number of wounded was closer to 1,500.

Plans have been circulated on social media to burn large numbers of tires on Friday, in hopes that thick black smoke would block the view of Israeli snipers.

Hamas has said the protests would culminate in a ‘March of Return’ implying the demonstrators would at some point try cross the border fence into Israeli territory. </s> JERUSALEM, Israel – Recently released information refutes Hamas' claim that a baby girl died of tear gas inhalation at last month's riots near the Israeli border.

The Palestinian Health Ministry included the eight-month-old infant on its list of fatalities during the May 14 demonstrations. According to a Times of Israel report, some people within Gaza's health system were skeptical of the tear gas story.

Now Israel reports that Mahmoud Omar, a 20-year-old member of Fatah's "armed wing," the al-Aksa Martyrs' Brigades, arrested while trying to infiltrate Israel, told interrogators that Hamas Gaza chief Yahya Sinwar paid the baby's relatives to lie about the cause of her death.

It turned out the arrestee, now indicted, is a cousin of Leila Ghandour, the baby who reportedly succumbed to tear gas fired by IDF soldiers to keep demonstrators away from the security fence.

The news of her death went "viral."

During interrogation, Omar said he'd taken part in the border demonstrations that day. He left after learning that his baby cousin had died. When he got home, he found out she died from the same blood disease that killed her infant brother a year earlier.

At the time of her death, the IDF also questioned the report, with an IDF spokesperson saying Israel had evidence that undermined health ministry's claim.

During interrogation, the baby's cousin also confessed he'd been offered payment for his family if he joined the brigades' Mujahideen unit, Fatah's "military wing," which is on both the US and UK terror lists. It's a variation sof the pay-to-slay ideology embraced by both Palestinian factions – Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Fatah in Ramallah. </s> Two Hamas security forces have been killed in Gaza during an operation to arrest the main suspect in the bombing attack of Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah's convoy last week.

The suspect, Anas Abu Khousa, and an accomplice, Abdul Hadi al-Ashab, sustained critical injuries during Thursday's operation and later died of their wounds, according to the interior ministry.

Khousa and Ashab reportedly resisted arrest and exchanged fire with authorities.

Several security guards of Hamdallah were wounded during the March 13 attack, which took place while the prime minister was visiting Gaza.

The blast happened shortly after Hamdallah's convoy passed through the Israeli-controlled Erez checkpoint, known to Palestinians as Beit Hanoun, in northern Gaza.

Hamdallah heads the Palestinian Authority government based in Ramallah in the West Bank.

President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, has accused Hamas of orchestrating the explosion.

The attack and subsequent statements by both sides mark a serious deterioration in relations between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.

Fatah, the ruling party within the PA, and Hamas, the party that governs the occupied Gaza Strip, signed a reconciliation agreement in October 2017, ending a decade of division that saw two parallel governments operating in Gaza and the West Bank, respectively.

But the deal was never fully implemented due to differences within the two political factions, which are the largest in Palestinian politics.

Analysts said the attack on Hamdallah's convoy was intended to put a strain on reconciliation efforts. </s> Palestinian terror organization Islamic Jihad said Saturday that four of its members were killed in an accidental explosion near the Gaza Strip border with Israel.

The group said in a statement that the four died during “preparations,” without giving further details. Army Radio reported that the terrorists were killed while carrying explosives in an all-terrain vehicle, suggesting the blast may have been a “work accident.” AFP said they were riding a tuk tuk vehicle which exploded a few hundred meters from the border with Israel.

The four fatalities were named as Hisham Abdel Al, Elias Al Katrous, Ae’d Al Hamaydeh, and Mohammad Al Krinawi, according to Palestinian sources.

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Islamic Jihad is an ally of terrorist group Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip. The group, which is supported by Iran, has fought alongside Hamas against Israel in multiple wars, most recently in 2014.

The Hamas-controlled Health Ministry initially claimed the blast east of Rafah in southern Gaza was caused by an Israeli strike. The IDF denied any involvement in the incident and said none of its forces had opened fire in the area.

The incident came amid tensions along the security fence in recent weeks, with the Palestinians holding mass marches near the border, and in some cases rioting, for the last three consecutive weekends. Israel says the violence is being orchestrated by Hamas, which it accuses of trying to carry out border attacks under the cover of large protests.

Israel has noted a gradual decrease in the number of Gazans protesting each week.

On Friday, at least 10,000 Gazans took part in large-scale demonstrations, with the Israeli military saying protesters hurled an explosive device and firebombs at Israeli troops deployed at the border, as well as making “several attempts” to damage the fence between Israel and Gaza and cross over into Israeli territory.

Protesters torched tires and burned large Israeli flags, as well as posters of Israel’s prime minister and defense minister. Large plumes of black smoke from burning tires rose into the sky. They also burned pictures of US President Donald Trump and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Last Friday, about 20,000 Palestinians took part in the demonstrations, with the previous week attracting an estimated 30,000.

More than 30 Palestinians have been killed in the clashes over the part three weeks, according to Hamas-run health authorities. Hamas has acknowledged that several of those killed were its members, and Israel has identified other fatalities as members of terrorist groups.

The protests are part of what Hamas said will be several weeks of “March of Return” demonstrations, which Hamas leaders say ultimately aim to see the removal of the border and the liberation of Palestine.

The idea of mass protests was initially floated by Palestinian social media activists in Gaza, but was later co-opted by Hamas, which avowedly seeks Israel’s destruction, with the backing of smaller terror groups.

Gaza leaders have planned the so-called Marches of Return to culminate in a million-strong march in mid-May, coinciding with Israel’s 70th Independence Day, the opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem, and Nakba Day — when the Palestinians mark what they call the “catastrophe” that befell them with Israel’s creation.

The “Return” refers to Palestinians’ demand that tens of thousands of refugees and their millions of descendants be allowed to live in today’s Israel, an influx that would spell the end of Israel as the world’s sole Jewish-majority state.

Agencies contributed to this report
Rival Hamas and Fatah members clash in the Gaza Strip at a tent set up by the family of Mohammed Ayoub, 14, to receive condolences on his death in the protests. Hamas later dismantles the tent and orders all present to leave.