Israeli troops opened fire on Sunday at Palestinian and Syrian protesters who tried to enter the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights from neighboring Syria, killing at least 14 people and wounding scores.

The casualty figures came from Syrian state television and were confirmed by the head of a hospital treating the casualties, AP reported. The television report said a woman and child were among the dead.
Dr. Ali Kanaan, director of the Quneitra hospital, confirmed the state television report of 14 dead -- 12 Palestinians and two Syrians. He said 225 were wounded. The youngest among the dead on a list from the hospital was 15-year-old Palestinian Mohammed Issa who lived in the Neira refugee camp in Aleppo, Syria.
The protesters had approached the border on Sunday, a day observed as “Naksa Day” or “Day of Defeat”, marking the 44th anniversary of the 1967 war, when Israel occupied the area.
Mustafa Barghouthi, an independent Palestinian politician, told Al Jazeera: “What we saw in the Golan Heights, in front of the checkpoint to Beit-ul-Moqaddas (Jerusalem), were peaceful Palestinian demonstrators demanding their freedom and the end of occupation, which has become the longest in modern history.
“And they were encountered by terrible violence from Israel. They have used gunshots, tear gas, sound bombs and canisters emanating dangerous chemicals against demonstrators,” he said.
“They also beat us. I was one of those who was beaten today by the Israel soldiers today while we were peacefully trying to reach the checkpoint to Jerusalem.”
Despite Israel's warnings, thousands of demonstrators -- a mix of Palestinians and their Syrian supporters -- passed by Syrian and UN outposts early Sunday and marched to the barbed-wire lined trench the Israeli military dug along the border after last month's unrest. Protesters waved Palestinian flags and threw rocks and trash over the fence.
As the crowd reached the border, Zionist soldiers shouted warnings through megaphones. “Anybody who gets close to the fence is endangering his life,” they said.
When the demonstrators pushed forward, troops opened fire, sending crowds running in panic. Several wounded people were taken away by demonstrators, but dozens more continued heading toward the trench. Those evacuating casualties shouted “shahid,” or “martyr.”
Protesters, most of them young men, eventually managed to cut through coils of barbed wire marking the frontier, entering a buffer zone and crawling toward a second fence guarded by Israeli troops. Every so often, they evacuated a dead or wounded protester, and more men raced in to take their place.
Several protesters said the saw a landmine explode near two Israeli soldiers as they were chasing away the crowds at the border.
“We were trying to cut the barbed wire when the Israeli soldiers began shooting directly at us,” Ghayath Awad, a 29-year-old Palestinian who had been shot in the waist, told the AP at the hospital.
Israel had vowed to prevent a repeat of a similar demonstration last month, in which hundreds of people burst across the border into Golan Heights.
More than a dozen people were killed in that unrest, in which protesters had gathered to mark the 63rd anniversary of the “Nakba Day”, to mark the expulsion of an estimated 700,000 Palestinians following Israel's 1948 declaration of statehood.
Israel annexed the Golan Heights from Syria in 1981 in a move that was never recognized internationally.