Ni’lin – Ma’an – Israeli soldiers rained tear gas on hundreds of protesters against the Israeli separation wall in the West Bank village of Ni’lin, west of Ramallah, on Friday.

The protesters were calling for the removal of the structure and Israeli settlements that have been built on lands seized from their town.

Men from the village first gathered in an olive grove for the Friday Muslim prayer at noon, and were later joined by more than 200 international and Israeli supporters who marched, chanting and singing, to the illegal barrier.

Awaiting its final concrete form, the barrier at this stage is a pair of barbed wire fences on either side of an army access road. Upon reaching the barrier, waiting soldiers fired a barrage of tear-gas grenades, sending demonstrators running. Medics treated dozens of protesters on the spot for the excruciating effects of the gas.

Teenage Palestinian boys, their faces covered with scarves, responded by hurling small stones at the soldiers who remained on the opposite side of the fence. The Israeli troops continued firing tear gas and stun grenades, forcing the protesters upwind of the gas.

After an hour and a half of clashes, which took place in view of the Israeli settlement of Hashmonaim, the soldiers crossed the fence, attempting to surround the stone-throwing teens. Some demonstrators were forced to scramble up a nearby hill to escape.

No one was reported hospitalized or arrested.

Over the past year Israeli forces have killed five Palestinians during Ni’lin’s weekly demonstration and critically injured an American activist, who remains in a coma at a Tel Aviv hospital. Dozens have been shot with live ammunition and rubber-coated bullets at the protests.

Israel’s wall snakes through Palestinian communities in the occupied West Bank, looping around Israeli settlements and cementing the de facto annexation of Palestinian land. The International Court of Justice ruled the wall illegal in an advisory opinion in 2004. Designed to be more than 700 kilometers in length, the wall is still under construction.

After losing the vast majority of its original 58,000 dunums of land to Israel in 1948, the village has been further shrunk (another 8,000 dunums) by settlements built after Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967. Ni’lin will lose approximately 2,500 dunums (2.5 square kilometers) when construction of the wall is completed, leaving the town with just 7,300 dunums.