Israeli forces clash with Palestinian protesters against Nablus siege

The clashes took place at the Huwara checkpoint in southern Nablus on Tuesday after the troops attacked a Palestinian march, which had been formed to contest the lockdown, the Palestinian Information Center news agency reported.

The forces hurled teargas canisters at the protesters, which caused a number of them to suffer suffocation.

The occupying regime started imposing the siege around three weeks ago as means of hunting down Palestinian fighters hailing from a West Bank-based resistance group known as Lions' Den.

"...Nablus is living under a complete siege, and the world should pay attention to his siege. All countries and organizations must pay attention to it," Dalal Salameh, a member of the Central Committee of the West Bank-based Palestinian Fatah movement, told AFP.

Muhammad Hamdan, secretary-general of the movement in Nablus, meanwhile said, at times the regime "claims that it has eased the siege" in order to "lure some resistance fighters."

Also on Tuesday, Israeli troops fatally shot a Palestinian and injured three more during an operation elsewhere in Nablus, the West Bank-headquartered Palestinian Authority's health ministry reported.

Alaa Zaghal, 21 "died of a bullet wound to the head fired by the occupation army in Deir Al-Hatab, east of Nablus,” it added.

Late last month, the United Nations special coordinator for "the Middle East Peace Process," Tor Wennesland, warned that "2022 is on course to be the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank since the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs began systematically tracking Palestinian fatalities in 2005.”

"Near-daily instances of violence, [are] unfolding against a backdrop of unabated Israeli settlement expansion, evictions of Palestinians, and home demolitions,” Wennesland further underlined.

The Israeli regime occupied and annexed the West Bank, including East al-Quds, in a heavily-Western-backed war of aggression in 1967.

Ever since, it has dotted the territory with hundreds of illegal settlements that have come to house hundreds of thousands of settlers that immigrated to the occupied Palestine -- mostly from Europe and the United States.