Israeli troops opened fire Sunday at dozens of Palestinian and foreign peace activists in a village in the West Bank, wounding at least ten people, medics and witnesses said.  

The activists were demonstrating against Israeli army bulldozers which were razing and leveling a wide area of Palestinian-owned agricultural land at the village of Kharabtha Bani Hareth, west of the West Bank city of Ramallah, the witnesses said.

The soldiers fired tear gas canisters as well as rubber-coated metal bullets at the protestors, the medics said, adding that one of the wounded was a foreign peace activist who was hit in his eye by a rubber bullet.

Mustafa Barghouti, head of the Palestinian Initiative organization in Ramallah, told reporters that the protest was aimed at denouncing the construction of security wall.

Part of the wall which would pass through the village "would swallow wide areas of lands cultivated with olives," Barghouti said, adding that more than 2000 trees of olives, almonds and figs would be outside the wall.

(Xinhua News Agency March 22, 2004)