Israeli snipers killed Thomas Hurndall while trying to defend Palestinian chidlren

GAZA CITY, April 11 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - A 21-year-old British activist was pronounced clinically dead Friday, April 11, after being hit in the head and critically wounded by Israeli sniper fire in Rafah refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip, Palestinian medical sources confirmed.

Thomas Hurndall was volunteering with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a group of pro-Palestinian activists who engage in non-violent action to protect Palestinian civilians in the West Bank and Gaza, the sources and eyewitnesses told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

A colleague who witnessed the incident said he was trying to pull two children out of danger with a group of other foreign activists and Palestinian civilians when shots were fired from an Israeli army watchtower some 100 meters away.

"He was trying to pull two girls out of danger when he was hit in the head by a bullet," eyewitness and British ISM colleague Rafael Cohen, 37, told AFP.

Doctors at Rafah hospital said the young man was pronounced clinically dead shortly after he was admitted.

He was later airlifted to a hospital in the southern Israeli town of Beersheva, members of the ISM team in Rafah said.

A spokesman for the British Embassy told AFP his family had been notified.

Cohen, who was standing 15 meters (yards) away when the shooting occurred, said Israeli troops were firing over the heads of a group of children playing on a mound of earth and Thomas, who was dressed in a fluorescent ISM jacket, had gone to pull them down.

"At first they were firing several meters over the children's heads but it was getting very, very dangerous so Tom went to help them.

"He was at ground level when they shot him directly in the head," Cohen said, accusing the Israeli snipers of lowering their aim and deliberately targeting Hurndall.

He arrived in Rafah on Sunday after spending several days training in the West Bank, he recalled.

Before arriving in the Palestinian territories, Hurndall had been in Iraq acting as a human shield, after which he spent some time in Jordan.

The Israeli army would not comment on the incident.

It was the third such incident in the past four weeks in which a foreign peace activist was injured or killed during Israeli military operations.

Last Saturday, two foreign ISM activists were wounded by Israeli gunfire, one of them seriously, during clashes between Palestinian stone-throwers and armed-to-the-teeth Israeli soldiers in the northern West Bank city of Jenin.

A 24-year-old American, Barry Avery, suffered a serious gunshot wound to the face, while a Danish man, Lasse Schmidt, 35, was wounded in the leg by shrapnel, medics said.

And last month, Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old U.S. national also volunteering with the ISM, was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer in Rafah as she was trying to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian house.

The Israeli army said it was an "accident" and has yet to reveal the result of its investigation into her death.

On November 22, Israeli occupation forces gunned down Ian Hook, a British U.N. worker in Jenin refugee camp.