NABLUS, West Bank (AP) -
Israeli soldiers shot and killed a Palestinian man during a clash with stone throwers Saturday as the military pushed forward with a large-scale crackdown in this West Bank city, Palestinian witnesses and medical workers said.
The army said it was investigating the report of a fatal shooting. In later rioting, Palestinian crowds fired guns and threw bricks and Molotov cocktails at soldiers, the army said.
The Israeli army has been operating in Nablus for more than a week, calling the city a "hotbed of terrorist activity."
But Saturday's incursion partly was a response to a suicide bombing near Tel Aviv on Thursday, Israeli officials said. That bombing, which killed four Israelis, is believed to have originated in Nablus, they added.
Meanwhile, several thousand people in the West Bank town of Qalqiliya demonstrated against Israel's construction of a separation barrier. About 200 people marched to the barrier and climbed the 25-foot-high concrete structure. Some threw rocks and burned tires.
Witnesses said one person was wounded slightly in the head by a rubber bullet fired by Israeli troops, and several others were treated for tear gas inhalation.
The army said it used smoke grenades to disperse the crowd when people started climbing on the barrier, but it had not fired any bullets. It said a teenage boy was hit in the head by a rock thrown by protesters.
The barrier, which Israel says is needed to block suicide bombers, includes a concrete wall encircling much of Qalqiliya, making it difficult to enter or exit the town of 30,000 people located just across the West Bank border with Israel. Last year, militants from the town fired at an adjacent Israeli expressway, killing a girl in a car.
Gustav Fridolin, a member of the Swedish parliament from the Green Party, told the crowd they should oppose the barrier through peaceful means.
"I came here to participate in the demonstration and to show people here that they are not alone, there are European politicians and people that think building the wall is madness," Fridolin told The Associated Press.
In Nablus, Palestinian witnesses said Regai Rayan, 20, of the Balata refugee camp, was shot in the back and later died after a crowd of youths began throwing rocks at an Israeli tank. Seven other Palestinians were lightly wounded, they said.
In a separate clash in a nearby village, a 13-year-old boy was shot twice in the stomach and seriously wounded, Palestinian witnesses and medical workers said.
Tanks were patrolling Nablus, and soldiers were entering homes, witnesses said. Dozens of residents were detained for questioning, they said.
In one incident, a middle school and high school for girls was evacuated after troops fired tear gas in the area. Palestinian schools are open on Saturdays.
Troops imposed a closure in the eastern part of Nablus and witnesses said some 50,000 people, nearly half the city's population, were forced to stay in their homes.
Despite the latest violence, Israel's military chief said in an interview published Friday that a cease-fire halting three years of fighting could be just weeks away.
"It is possible that we will reach a cease-fire in the coming weeks," Maj. Gen. Moshe Yaalon told the Yediot Ahronot newspaper. "The Palestinian-Israeli conflict will be with us for many years to come, but I believe we have now passed the peak of the violent struggle."
Yaalon told the newspaper that Hamas, the Islamic group responsible for most suicide bombings over the past three years, has decided to halt attacks inside Israel.
Osama Hamdan, a Hamas spokesman in Beirut, Lebanon, denied that the group has halted attacks inside Israel. He said Israel made the claim to create divisions among the Palestinian factions.
"The time is not appropriate and there can be no talk of a truce for the time being as long as Israel is continuing its attacks against the Palestinian people," Hamdan said.
Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia has been pushing the various militant groups, so far without success, to agree to a truce to help restart more substantive peace talks with Israel.
Israel has publicly dismissed talk of a cease-fire, saying the Palestinian Authority must disarm the militants. But Israel has signaled it will respond favorably to a truce.
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