2016-07-27

JERUSALEM, Oct. 29 (AP)--Scattered Israeli-Palestinian clashes were reported Sunday near the West Bank towns of Ramallah and Nablus, as well as the Karni border crossing between Israel and Gaza, as Yasser Arafat said the violence would continue until Palestinians achieve their goal of a capital in Jerusalem.

At Karni, fighting broke out after Israeli tanks arrived to open a road to a nearby Jewish settlement.

The tanks fired live ammunition at about 200 Palestinian demonstrators, wounding at least six people, including a Palestinian policeman, according to Palestinian security sources.

One Palestinian man died, and a Palestinian boy wounded in the fighting and declared brain dead.

In the West Bank town of Nablus, two Palestinians were shot and killed during clashes with Israeli soldiers.

Another Palestinian died Sunday in Nablus from injuries suffered during clashes on Friday. In all, almost 140 people have died in a month of fighting that has all but wrecked the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Most of the dead have been Palestinians.

Earlier Sunday, along the Israeli-Lebanese border, Israeli soldiers were fired upon from unidentified gunmen on the north side of the border, according to Israeli security sources. It was the second such incident along the border in the past week.

In one of the restive Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, a guerrilla from Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah group was killed and two other people were wounded Sunday in a gunbattle with Muslim fundamentalists, Palestinian officials said.

On Saturday, Israeli troops fought Arab stone throwers with rubber-coated bullets and tear gas at chronic trouble spots in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, leaving more than 50 Palestinians injured. Though the confrontations also included at least a dozen shooting attacks on Israeli soldiers and a homemade bomb thrown at a border police patrol, no one was killed--a rarity since violence erupted a month ago.

The violence has dealt a harsh blow to the already anemic Palestinian economy. More than 100,000 Palestinians work in Israel, many providing the only income for large families, and tens of thousands of them have been unable to reach their jobs. Also, trade with Jordan and Egypt has been scaled back significantly, Palestinian officials said Sunday.

Ibrahim Hawamdi, a young Palestinian watching the clashes in the restive West Bank town of Ramallah, said Saturday that Palestinian anger was still running high. But ``people want to go back to work, they're running out of money,'' Hawamdi said.

The turmoil is also badly hurting the economy of Israel. Israeli economists estimate the losses so far at more than $1 billion, with the tourism business the hardest hit. Many sectors of the Israeli economy, such as agriculture, are suffering from the lack of Palestinian laborers.

On the political front, Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Barak said Sunday that after a week of tough negotiations he was close to forming a parliamentary coalition that could prevent the collapse of his minority government.

Parliament reconvenes Monday following a three-month recess, and Barak was moving toward a deal with the opposition Likud party, led by the hawkish Ariel Sharon, in a bid to stay in power and stave off early elections.

"The blessed Intifada (uprising) of our people will continue," Arafat said in a speech read in Gaza on his behalf by a senior aide, Tayyeb Abdel Rahim. "Our people have proven that they are able to continue the confrontation for years."

The Palestinian leader earlier told reporters at a Gaza hospital that his people would remain steadfast "until a boy or a girl holds the flag of Palestine over Jerusalem, the capital of our Palestinian state."

Palestinians say Sharon provoked the unrest on Sept. 28 by visiting Jerusalem's al-Aqsa mosque, one of Islam's holiest shrines built on the site revered by Jews as the Temple Mount where their biblical temples once stood.

Israel insists Palestinians seized on Sharon's visit as a pretext to launch the "al-Aqsa Intifada" to seek political gain.

Elsewhere, a Palestinian plane flew from Amman, Jordan to Baghdad on Sunday, carrying 20 Palestinians wounded in the clashes as well as several Palestinian officials and lawmakers. The move was a show of solidarity and a challenge to U.N. sanctions against Iraq.

Also Sunday, Pope John Paul II urged an end to the Middle East bloodshed and appealed for a return to Israel-Palestinian peace talks. The pope spoke before a crowd of 80,000 at a stadium in Rome.

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