More than 7,400 people have been killed by Israeli-Palestinian violence since the outbreak of the second Palestinian uprising 10 years ago this month, an Israeli rights group said Monday. The vast majority of the 7,454 killed were Palestinians, who accounted for 6,371, or about 85 percent, of the total, the B'Tselem human rights group said in a statement. Of the Palestinian dead, 1,317 were minors.
The Palestinian toll includes at least 2,996 people who were not taking part in hostilities when they were killed and 2,193 who were, the group said. The remainder include 694 people who may or may not have been fighters, in addition to 240 who were assassinated and 248 police employed by the Hamas-run government who were killed during the 2008-2009 Gaza war.
Palestinians killed 1,083 Israelis during the same period, including 741 civilians, of whom 124 were minors. The other 342 were members of security forces. Tuesday marks the 10th anniversary of Ariel Sharon's controversial visit to the flashpoint Al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem's Old City, an event widely seen as sparking the second intifada, or uprising. The next four years saw scores of Palestinian suicide bombings in Israeli cities and large-scale military incursions in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
The violence began to fade after a 2005 summit between Sharon, then prime minister, and Mahmud Abbas, who succeeded Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in late 2004. The meeting was widely seen as signalling the end of the uprising. The other major round of bloodletting in the last decade was the 22-day Israeli offensive on Gaza in December 2008 and January 2009, in which some 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed.