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JERUSALEM (Ma'an) -- Palestinians launched large protests near the Al-Quds University campus in Abu Dis on Friday as Israeli border police arrested three Palestinians in the area.

The protests followed a successful Palestinian attempt to break through the Israeli separation wall.

Many Palestinian protestors also suffered from tear gas inhalation due to the heavy use of tear gas canisters by Israeli forces during the protests.

Clashes broke out near Al-Quds University campus, and at al-Kabsa junction, after Israeli forces raided the area and fired tear gas, rubber-coated steel bullets and stun grenades.

A spokesman for the Popular Resistance Committee, Hani Halabiya, said that a white truck belonging to Israeli Special Forces had entered the area and arrested three Palestinians after beating them.

Palestinian activists had managed to break open a hole in the Israeli separation wall, an operation that they had started on Wednesday, he added. He also said that Israeli forces fired tear gas canisters into the campus of Al-Quds University, causing two trees to catch on fire.

Halabiya said that soldiers arrested Jihad Uliyan while raiding homes in order to get on to their rooftops.

Witnesses said that an Israeli military Jeep on the Jerusalem side of the wall caught fire after a firebomb was thrown at it by Palestinian protestors.

Israel began building the separation wall in 2002, and the route has been the target of regular demonstrations by border towns whose land is cut off by its path. Israel has confiscated large plots of Palestinian land in order to build the wall.

When the 435-mile barrier is complete, 85 percent of it will have been built inside the occupied West Bank.

In 2004 the International Court of Justice ruled that the separation wall was illegal and "tantamount to annexation."

The internationally recognized Palestinian territories of which the West Bank and East Jerusalem form a part have been occupied by the Israeli military since 1967.
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