Israeli troops kill Palestinian young during Gaza protests -health ministry

Israeli forces shot dead a Palestinian and wounded 44 others taking part on Friday in weekly protests at the fortified Gaza Strip border, the Palestinian health ministry said, after days of rising tensions along the frontier.
Tamer Arafat, 23, was wounded in the head in southern Gaza Strip town of Rafah and died shortly after arriving at the local hospital, the Palestinian health ministry said.

Egyptian officials, who have frequently brokered ceasefires between Israel and Hamas, have been shuttling between the sides to try to restore calm, a Palestinian official told Reuters.

Gaza health authorities said some 200 people have been killed since Palestinians launched weekly border protests on March 30 last year. They are demanding the right to return to land from which their ancestors fled or were forced to flee during Israel's founding in 1948.

About 60 other Palestinians have been killed in other incidents.

Israel says it has no choice but to use deadly force at the protests to defend the frontier from militants trying to destroy the barrier and infiltrate. But its tactics against the protests have drawn international condemnation.

Independent U.N. investigators last week released a report saying that Israeli security forces may have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in killing scores of Palestinians at weekly protests in Gaza last year.

Gaza is home to 2 million Palestinians, nearly all of them descendants of refugees dating back to the 1948 Middle East war.

Israel and Egypt imposed a brutal blockade on the enclave after Hamas seized control of it in 2007, which the World Bank says has reduced the Gaza economy to a state of collapse. Israel has fought three wars against Hamas in the past decade.