Two wounded by live fire in a raid on al-Amari refugee camp

The Palestine Red Crescent Society said its crews treated two people struck by live rounds on Saturday, after Israeli troops moved into al-Amari refugee camp in the early hours of the morning. The camp lies inside al-Bireh, the town that adjoins Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.

One of the two was a boy of 15, hit in the back. The other was a young man with a bullet wound to the leg. Both were carried out by the society's crews and taken on to hospital.

Neither the accounts from the camp nor the wire reports that followed set out what the troops had come for, how long they stayed, or what preceded the shooting. No Israeli military account of the raid accompanied them.

Entries of this kind are a routine of the occupation rather than an exception to it: forces move into West Bank towns and camps on most nights, and the pattern that recurs is gunfire, searches of houses and arrests before withdrawal at first light. What varies between one night and the next is only whether anyone is hit.

The refugee camps carry more of that risk than the towns around them. They were laid out for a stay measured in months and have been lived in for decades, so the lanes are narrow and the houses press against one another. A raid conducted inside them happens within a few metres of people asleep in their homes, and a round fired in a street that width has nowhere to travel that is not somebody's wall or somebody's back.

Later the same morning, Israeli forces shut the entrance to al-Mughayyir, a village northeast of Ramallah, to traffic once again, according to local reporting.