Hamas yesterday condemned a fatal shooting attributed to Egyptian border guards of who they said was a Palestinian minor on the Gaza border on Friday.
“We condemn the killing of the child, Zaki Hopi, by Egyptian army gunfire on the borders; we consider what happened as a dangerous development and excessive use of force,” the militant organization said in a statement. “What happened is not appropriate to neighborly relations between brothers.”
Gaza emergency services spokesman Ashraf al-Qudra said that Hopi was 17 years old, and not 23 as previously stated.
He was killed in the Gaza frontier town of Rafah by Egyptian soldiers firing from across the border, al-Qudra said, although the motive was not immediately clear.
The border troops shot Hopi “in the back and the bullet settled in the heart. He died on the spot,” al-Qudra told reporters.
Hopi is the first Palestinian “to have been killed in a long time” along the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt, al-Qudra said.
Egypt announced on Tuesday that work to double the width of a buffer zone along the Gaza border would begin next week to prevent suspected militants infiltrating from the Palestinian enclave.
Construction of the 500m buffer zone along 10km of the border comes after an Oct. 24 suicide bombing that killed 30 Egyptian soldiers. About 800 homes are being demolished in the process.
Egypt the declared a three-month emergency in parts of North Sinai and closed the Rafah border crossing for two months.
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