An Israel Defense Forces soldier shot and lightly wounded a Palestinian in the West Bank Wednesday after he tried to snatch a soldier's weapon at a checkpoint near Ramallah.

Ambulances arrived on the scene and evacuated the Palestinian to a hospital in Ramallah.

No soldiers were wounded in the incident.

Earlier on Wednesday, at least 17 people were wounded during clashes between dozens of settlers from a settlement where a terrorist killed an Israeli teenager last week and Palestinians in a nearby West Bank village.

Sixteen Palestinians were wounded in the incident near the settlement of Bat Ayin, one seriously, and one Israeli was lightly hurt.

The violence erupted when a group of settler youths began throwing stones at Palestinians on the outskirts of the village of Safa, who threw stones back in return. The settlers had earlier left a prayer service held on a nearby hilltop in memory of Shlomo Nativ, 16, who was killed by an axe-wielding Palestinian on Thursday.

An IDF spokeswoman said the violence started when Palestinians threw stones at the settlers. She said soldiers fired live bullets at the legs of some stone-throwers.

In the attack on Thursday, the terrorist also wounded a 7-year-old boy. A local man fought the terrorist and managed to pry the ax away from him, but the assailant, whose identity remains unknown, managed to escape and has not been caught.

Some 1,000 Israelis live in Bat Ayin, near the Palestinian towns of Hebron and Bethlehem.

In 2002, three settlers from Bat Ayin were sentenced by an Israeli court to prison terms ranging from 12 to 15 years for trying to set off a bomb near a Palestinian girls' school in Arab East Jerusalem.

The wounded seven-year-old boy is a son of one of the three jailed settlers.