Ramallah, April 25 (RHC)-- A Palestinian teenager has been shot dead by Israeli border guards at a checkpoint in the occupied East Jerusalem. Israeli security forces killed the 16-year-old Palestinian boy on Friday night while he was walking towards the al-Zaim checkpoint with his family, claiming that he intended to stab an Israeli officer.

Also on Friday, Israeli forces opened fire on the Palestinian protesters in Kafr Qaddum village near the northern West Bank city of Qalqilya, injuring seven people, the Palestinian Ma'an News Agency reported. One protester was hit with live fire, medical sources said, adding that another lost his eye after being shot with a rubber-coated steel bullet.

Residents of Kafr Qaddum hold weekly protest rallies to express their anger at the illegal Israeli settlements as well as the construction of a separation wall that snakes across the occupied West Bank, isolating large swathes of Palestinian territories. A number of Palestinian protesters in the West Bank village of Bilin also suffered breathing problems after Israeli soldiers fired teargas to disperse them.

More than half a million Israelis live in over 120 settlements built since Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories in the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 1967.

The UN and most countries -- with the exception of the United States -- regard the Israeli settlements as illegal because the territories were captured by Israel in the 1967 war and are hence subject to the Geneva Conventions, which forbid construction on occupied lands.