405 Palestinians were injured by Israeli military forces and settlers in multiple clashes across the occupied West Bank over a two week period in April, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA). The humanitarian agency reported that the latest figures bring the number of Palestinian injuries since the beginning of the year to 1,400.

Palestinians take part in a Land Day demonstration held in the city of Al-Bireh just south of the Israeli settlement of Beit El, in the occupied West Bank on March 30, 2019. (Photo: Activestills)

According to the agency’s Protection of Civilians Report covering the period April 9-22, in one major incident on April 9 in the Israeli-controlled area of the city of Hebron, Israeli forces fired multiple tear gas canisters inside the compound of a boys’ school during clashes in the area. As a result, a total of 350 Palestinians, the majority of them students, required treatment after inhaling gas.

In addition, Israeli settlers carried out 12 attacks on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank during the two-week period covered by the report. These attacks led to 23 Palestinian injuries and damage to Palestinian property. In two separate incidents in the “H2” area of Hebron, on April 13 and 18, Israeli settlers attacked four Palestinians, including two women, with pepper spray.

The agency reported that 19 Palestinians were injured by settlers, or by the soldiers accompanying them, in clashes after settlers entered two Ramallah-area villages (Turmus’ayya and Al-Mazra’a al-Qibliya) and two Nablus-area villages (Urif and Burin). Further attacks included Israeli settlers vandalizing four tractors in the village of Qaryut in the Nablus region, 23 cars in Ein Yabrud, near Ramallah, and the spraying of graffiti on three houses in Ein Yabrud.

At Asira al-Qibliya in the Nablus region, “settlers erected fences in an attempt to take over some 50 dunums of Palestinian-owned land near the settlement of Yitzhar,” while near the settlement outpost of Adei Ad near Ramallah, 55 olive trees were vandalized “in an area whose access requires prior coordination with the Israeli authorities.”

A Palestinian youth, Omar Awni Younes, 20, died on Saturday evening, April 27, at Beilinson Hospital in Israel from wounds he sustained last week, when he was shot and critically injured by Israeli forces near Nablus, the Palestinian Ministry of Health announced. Younes, who was from the village of Sanniriya in the occupied West Bank, was shot dead by Israeli soldiers on April 20 at the Za’tara military checkpoint on the Nablus-Ramallah road, after the soldiers claimed he had attempted to stab some of them with a knife. Younes had been receiving medical treatment at Beilinson Hospital until he died from his mortal wounds.