10/24/2014 - 19:27 GMT
by Hossam EZZEDINE
Israeli troops shot dead a Palestinian teenager Friday that the army said was about to hurl a petrol bomb at Israeli motorists near the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah.
A spokeswoman said troops staked out at the village of Silwad to protect a major road widely used by Israeli settlers, spotted a person about to hurl a petrol bomb at traffic.
"The forces fired immediately to neutralise the danger... and confirmed a hit," she said.
Palestinian officials named the youth as Orwa Hammad, 17, saying he was shot during a stone-throwing protest against troops. This is a routine occurrence at Silwad, which lied near Ofra settlement.
Locals in Silwad said Hammad's father lives in the United States and that the youth held US citizenship.
US officials in Jerusalem could not immediately confirm those claims.
Earlier, police in annexed east Jerusalem clashed with Palestinians, firing tear gas to disperse stone throwing protesters.
They were deployed in force ahead of weekly Muslim prayers and restricted access to a flashpoint mosque, after a deadly Palestinian attack sent tensions soaring.
- Nightly clashes -
Nightly clashes have broken out since a Palestinian ploughed his car into a crowd of pedestrians on Wednesday, killing a baby and injuring six other people before he was shot dead by police.
The security presence was boosted across east Jerusalem including the Old City, police spokeswoman Luba Samri said.
Palestinian men under the age of 40 were not allowed into Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa mosque compound for Friday prayers because of fears of further unrest, she said.
The compound is the scene of frequent clashes between Palestinians and Israeli police.
The plaza houses the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa mosque, Islam's third-holiest site. It is also revered by Jews as the location of the biblical Jewish temples, considered Judaism's holiest place.
Prayers concluded on Friday afternoon with clashes in the Wadi Joz neighbourhood north of the Old City. Palestinians there threw stones and fired flares at police, who dispersed them and arrested three demonstrators, Samri said.
An AFP correspondent said undercover police in the crowd of Palestinians made the arrests.
There were also clashes in east Jerusalem's Issawiya neighbourhood, where AFP photographers saw police fire bursts of tear gas to break up a crowd of Palestinians who hurled rocks and burned tyres on the streets.
There were no reports of injuries on either side.
Samri said around 8,000 people took part in prayers at Al-Aqsa, with hundreds of others in areas around the site.
Overnight, two Palestinians were arrested during clashes in the Old City in which stones, bottles and flares were thrown or fired at police, who used unspecified "riot dispersal" weapons, Samri said.
The fighting has shaken annexed east Jerusalem on an almost daily basis since the murder of a Palestinian teenager by Jewish extremists in July.
Clashes intensified during a 50-day war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
Police branded Wednesday's incident -- in which 21-year-old Abdelrahman Shaludi from Silwan in east Jerusalem drove at high speed into a crowd of Israelis -- a "terror attack".
Silwan -- a densely populated Arab neighbourhood on a steep hillside just south of the Old City -- has been the focus of Palestinian anger over Jewish settlements in east Jerusalem.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned that any further attacks would be met with "the harshest response".
Washington confirmed that the baby killed was a US citizen.
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