Israeli occupation soldiers shot dead three Palestinians, including a 14-year-old boy, who were among thousands of people who thronged to the fortified Gaza Strip border on Friday as part of weekly protests launched half a year ago, Gaza health officials said. Gaza health officials said 190 people had been wounded. At least 187 Palestinians have been killed since the Gaza protests began on March 30 to demand rights to lands lost to Israel in the 1948 war of its foundation, and the easing of an Israeli economic blockade. In the wake of the ‘Great March of Return' demonstrations, which started on 30 March, Gaza's already overstretched health sector has been struggling to cope with the mass influx of casualties. Israel has maintained a crippling blockade on Gaza which it argues is necessary to isolate Hamas. The blockade is worsening humanitarian conditions in Gaza, which human rights advocates have described as collective punishment of the Palestinians living in the strip. More than 2 million people are packed into Gaza, whose economic plight is a focus of so-far fruitless U.S.-led efforts to restart Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, stalled since 2014. The Gaza Strip faces an unprecedented humanitarian crisis, caused by over 10 years of Israeli blockade, alongside an internal Palestinian divide, which worsened in 2017, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). *This story has been edited by Ahram Online.
