ISRAELI military snipers killed at least three Palestinian protesters and wounded 40 others today as Gaza residents staged their latest Great Return March.

Thousands of unarmed peaceful demonstrators streamed to five tent encampments that organisers had set up at various points from north to south of the Gaza strip, each several hundred yards from the border fence.

They showed a refusal to be intimidated by Israel’s military might or last week’s murderous attacks which saw 18 civilians killed by snipers on the spurious grounds that they were approaching the border fence.

Today’s fatalities brought the total number of Palestinians killed by the Israeli occupation forces to 25.

In one camp near the border community of Khuzaa today, activists set large piles of tyres alight, engulfing the area in black smoke meant to shield them from Israeli snipers. Water cannon trained a stream of thick liquid at the fence.

The troops on the other side of the fence fired live rounds, tear gas and rubber-coated steel pellets.

Within minutes, several young men with gunshot wounds began arriving at a field clinic at the camp.

Mohammed Ashour, 20, who had been among the first to set light to the tyres, was shot in the right arm. He rested on a stretcher placed on the ground.

“We came here because we want dignity,” he said before paramedics carried him to an ambulance to be transported to the strip’s main hospital.

Yehia Abu Daqqa, a 20-year-old student, said he had come to demonstrate and honour those killed in previous protests.

“Yes, there is fear,” he said of the risks of advancing toward the fence. “We are here to tell the occupation that we are not weak.”

Several weeks of protests against a decade-old border blockade of the territory are planned.

Israeli military spokesman Lt Col Jonathan Conricus portrayed the protests as riots, claiming that Hamas organisers were trying to use them as a diversion to “open up the fence and then to insert terrorists into Israel.”

He insisted snipers are used “sparingly” and only against those who pose a “significant threat.”