Syria behind Golan clashes: Israel

Syria said 23 people, including a woman and a child, were killed and 350 wounded on Sunday when Israeli troops fired on pro-Palestinian protestors who surged against the fortified boundary fence on Syria's Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon said live Israeli fire had caused casualties and U.N. monitors were “seeking to confirm facts.”

Israel contested the Syrian account and said President Bashar al-Assad was trying to shift world attention from the killing of at least 1,100 Syrians in anti-government revolts.

“You cannot reach the Syrian-Israeli border from the Syrian side without clear instructions and approvals from the government in Damascus,” Israeli Civil Defense Minister Matan Vilnai said.

“For Assad, there is the supreme interest that these protests draw the fire and the attention from him to other directions,” Vilnai told Israel's Army Radio. “He uses (the Palestinians). He simply uses them.”

Sunday's protest was held to mark the 44th anniversary of the 1967 Middle East war, when Israel captured the Golan Heights, as well as the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, where Palestinians want to establish a state.

Though Israel and Syria are technically at war, and Syria is home to hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war of Israel's foundation, the Golan had long been quiet.

That changed on May 15, when scores of flag-waving pro-Palestinian activists flattened a fence on the demarcation line and briefly rallied inside Israeli-controlled territory.

Rattled by the breach, Israel beefed up its defenses and warned that lethal force could be used. A Reuters reporter on the scene on Sunday saw Israeli snipers firing at demonstrators at the fence and 10 people taken away on stretchers by comrades.

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