In 2016 Israel killed highest number of Palestinians

Israeli forces killed more than 100 people, including 33 children, in 2016, marking the highest numbers of deaths in Palestine in a decade.

More than 111 Palestinian were killed in 2016, almost all of them at the hands of Israeli forces, according to a tally by the Palestinian Ma’an news agency which also reported that the past year has been the deadliest for Palestinian children in more than a decade.

Since October 2015, the occupied West Bank has seen a surge in violence as part of a repressive Israeli crackdown on Palestinian protests against the Israeli occupation and a wave of stabbing attacks on Israeli soldiers and settlers by lone Palestinian attackers.

Since the outbreak of the violence in 2015, more than 246 Palestinians have been killed, according to Ma’an, which also found that at least 135 lost their lives between October and December of 2015 alone.

Most of those Palestinians killed, 97 percent, were shot and killed by Israeli occupation forces and police, the agency said. However, less than half of Palestinian victims were killed by Israeli forces as they carried or at least attempted stabbing attacks. The rest lost their lives during clashes and protests in the West Bank.

Israel has been criticized by several human rights bodies and even the United Nations for its systematic extrajudicial killings of alleged attackers, who only had knives for weapons and whose threat could have been neutralized without using deadly force.