Injuries reported in Israel-Palestine clashes
Incidents in Jabaliya and Hebron leave at least 15 people injured as soldiers use rubber bullets and live rounds.
Two separate clashes between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian protesters, one in Gaza and one in the West bank City of Hebron, have left at least 15 people wounded.
At least 13 men were wounded in fighting not far from Jabaliya northeast of Gaza City, medical sources told Al Jazeera on Friday.
Ashraf al-Qudra, a spokesman for the Hamas-run health ministry, told AFP at least one man was in serious condition after being shot in the head, near the border fence in the central Gaza Strip.
Qudra said the shooting came after the Palestinians threw stones at Israeli soldiers.
An army spokeswoman told AFP “hundreds of Palestinians” had been throwing stones at Israeli soldiers beyond the border fence and attempting to sabotage it.
The soldiers opened live fire at “the lower extremities of the main instigators” after attempts to disperse them with riot dispersal means failed, she said.
Meanwhile, at least two protesters have been injured in clashes with Israeli soldiers in the biblical West Bank city of Hebron, according to the AP news agency.
AP reported the injured were hit by rubber bullets, citing medical officer Aid Jabari.
The protest was being held to mark the anniversary of the closure of a shopping street and many Palestinian businesses on Shuhaida Street that runs along Jewish settler compounds.
Clashes are common on Fridays, with regular protests near the border in support of Gaza farmers who say troops uprooted their trees to create a buffer zone.
Tensions have risen in and around Hamas-ruled Gaza after a year of relative calm, with Palestinian fighters firing projectiles at Israel and the Jewish state targeting Hamas facilities and fighters.
‘Framework for negotiations’
Meanwhile, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said on Friday that US attempts to forge an agreement on a framework for peace talks with Israel had so far failed but that the efforts were “extremely serious”.
Speaking in Paris after talks this week with US Secretary of State John Kerry, Abbas told journalists: “So far the Americans have not been able to put these ideas into a framework, even if the efforts are extremely serious”.
After meeting with Abbas, French President Francois Hollande said he had underlined the need “to reach an agreed framework for negotiations in a timely manner”.
Abbas met with Kerry twice in Paris this week in what a US official described as “constructive” talks.
A Palestinian official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said on Friday that ideas proposed by Kerry in Paris could not be accepted “as the basis for a framework accord… as they do not take into account the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people”.