An eight-month-old Palestinian baby has died after inhaling teargas in a village near Bethlehem, the Palestinian ministry of health has said, on another day of killings and clashes in the West Bank.



The baby, named as Ramadan Mohammad Faisal Thawabta, suffocated inside his family home in Beit Fajjar, a village south of Bethlehem.

Israel places heavy security in East Jerusalem before Muslim prayers Read more

Abu Anan, a medic with Red Crescent, said Israeli forces had fired teargas into the house during clashes between the army and Palestinians. “We went to the family house and we tried to save his life, but we failed. He was dead,” he said.

It was not immediately clear if a teargas grenade had entered the house or if the baby had been exposed to gas that had seeped in from outside. Thawabta’s body was being transported to Beit Jala governmental hospital. The Israeli defence forces said they were looking into the incident.

The teargas was fired as Israeli soldiers faced off against stone-throwing Palestinian youths in one of a series of clashes that swept the West Bank on Friday.

While Muslim prayers at the al-Aqsa mosque – the focus of recent tensions – passed peacefully, elsewhere the unrest of recent weeks, which has left 60 Palestinians and 11 Israelis dead, continued.

Anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin's murder stirs what-ifs amid violence Read more

Israeli and Arab media reported that a Palestinian youth had been shot dead and another injured after an attempted knife attack on border guards in an incident at the Hawara checkpoint south of Nablus. Clashes were also reported from the Ramallah area further north and Hebron to the south.

Elsewhere in East Jerusalem another Palestinian stabbed an Israeli and was quickly shot and critically injured by border police close to the light railway line that links Jewish and Arab areas of the city – unilaterally united and annexed by Israel after the 1967 war. An Israeli was also injured in the shooting.