ABLUS, West Bank, Oct. 4 — Fleeing a burst of gunfire from Israeli soldiers, a gaggle of Palestinian boys beat a hasty retreat to the Balata refugee camp today after surging toward an Israeli patrol, stones in hand, in defiance of a curfew.

A teenager limped off, supported by friends who said he had been struck by an Israeli jeep. Up the road a tank stood ready, its turret pointed toward the camp entrance.

"They shot right next to us," Imad Suudi, 15, said after the skirmish with the Israelis. "We're not afraid."

As the current Palestinian uprising enters its third year with Israeli forces reoccupying most West Bank cities, children are often on the front line as soldiers use live ammunition to enforce curfews and break up violent street protests, sometimes with deadly results.

There were more young casualties today. At Nazlat Zeid, a village near Jenin, soldiers imposing a curfew opened fire during a stone-throwing clash, killing Muhammad Zeid, 15, reportedly as he stood near his house. The army said the soldiers had violated firing regulations.

Near the Askar refugee camp in Nablus, Ibrahim Madani, 12, was critically wounded in the head when Israeli troops fired at a nearby taxi violating the curfew, residents said. A soldier at the camp was later shot and wounded when he got out of a tank to repair a tread, the army said.

The latest violence came as the London-based rights group Amnesty International issued a report this week asserting that both the Israeli Army and Palestinian armed groups were killing children with impunity.

The United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child called on Israelis and Palestinians today to "refrain from using and/or targeting children in the armed conflict," which it said had been marked by "acts of terror on both sides."

Amnesty International said more than 250 Palestinian children had been killed from the outbreak of the violence in September 2000 to the end of August this year. Seventy-two Israeli children have been killed, 70 percent of them in suicide bombings, it said. About 7,000 Palestinian children and hundreds of Israeli children have been wounded.

The overwhelming majority of Palestinian child victims were killed when "members of the Israeli Defense Forces responded to demonstrations and stone-throwing incidents with excessive and disproportionate use of force, and as a result of the I.D.F.'s reckless shooting, shelling and aerial bombardments of residential areas," the report said.

It asserted that most of the children were killed when the lives of soldiers were not at risk.

The report said both the Israeli and Palestinian authorities had consistently failed to punish those responsible for the killings, contributing to the persistence of such practices.

The Israeli justice minister, Meir Shetreet, said a distinction had to be drawn between the way Israeli and Palestinian children had been killed. "Israeli children were really murdered; they were not accidental casualties," he said in a radio interview. "They were murdered on purpose. I'm sorry for every Palestinian child who was hurt, but these children were not hurt deliberately."

In contrast to the army's use of live ammunition in the West Bank, the police in Jerusalem fired stun grenades today to break up a stone-throwing protest at the Aksa Mosque compound on the Temple Mount, ending the disturbance quickly with only a few slight injuries reported.

The protests followed a sermon during Friday Prayers at the mosque that criticized legislation signed by President Bush this week encouraging recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital. (Mr. Bush said he opposed that provision of the law.)

A few dozen Palestinian youths hurled stones at police officers at the gate of the compound, and about 50 officers charged in to prevent possible stoning of Jewish worshipers at the Western Wall below, a spokesman said.

The Arab League is expected to hold an emergency meeting next week on the new legislation, which Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, has called a "disaster."