Scores of Palestinians rioted in East Jerusalem on Sunday after hearing that a youth from their neighborhood had died of wounds suffered in a clash with Israeli police last week.

Protesters in the neighborhood of Wadi al-Joz close to the walled Old City threw rocks, firebombs and flares at passing cars, and riot officers responded with rubber bullets during an afternoon of clashes that lasted for several hours. There were no reports of serious injury.

Jerusalem emergency services said two firebombs were thrown at pumps at a gas station in the French Hill neighborhood, and that rioters broke into a nearby convenience store, causing heavy damage.

A police spokesman said a man was lightly wounded in the A-Tur neighborhood after rocks were thrown at his vehicle. The spokesman added that youth threw rocks in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Issawiya.

Mohammed Sunuqrut, 16, succumbed to a head wound suffered during a protest a week ago but the circumstances of how he sustained the wound were in dispute.

His father, Abdel-Majid, said his son had been hit in the head by a rubber bullet but Israeli police said Sunuqrut had been hit in the leg with a foam projectile and had fallen and hit his head while running away from officers.

The body was taken for a post-mortem examination in Tel Aviv and the Israeli Justice Ministry's police investigations unit was examining the circumstances of the case, a police spokesman said.

Street clashes with police in riot gear, military-style raids on homes late at night and stone-throwing at Israeli vehicles have marked the most serious outbreak of violence in Jerusalem since a Palestinian uprising a decade ago.

The violent protests in the city have been raging almost nightly beyond the spotlight on the Gaza war, leading to a crackdown by Israeli police in which hundreds of Palestinians have been detained.

The protests erupted in July after the murder of a Palestinian teen in an alleged revenge attack by three Jews, who are standing trial. That followed the killing of three Israeli youths in the occupied West Bank by Hamas Islamist militants.

Damage caused by Palestinians to a Jerusalem light railway, which links Arab and Jewish neighborhoods and was once hailed by Israeli authorities as a symbol of coexistence, had put a third of its carriages out of commission.



Some 40 percent of Jerusalem's 800,000 residents are Palestinians. They have Israeli-issued identity cards that entitle them - as residents of a city that Israel regards as part of the Jewish state - to the same civil rights and state-funded services afforded Israeli citizens.