RAMALLAH, West Bank, Oct 16 (Reuters) - Israeli soldiers shot and killed a Palestinian man in a confrontation in the occupied West Bank on Thursday, the third such killing in as many days, Palestinian medical sources said.

An Israeli military spokesman said soldiers had opened fire before dawn at three protesters in a village near the West Bank town of Ramallah, one of whom held a firebomb, and had hit one of them.

Sources at Ramallah hospital confirmed that one person was killed and one was wounded in the confrontation near Kufr Malik.

A source with the ambulance service said the man who was killed, whom village residents said was 20, had been shot in the leg and lost a lot of blood before he arrived at the hospital.

Another Palestinian man was killed on Wednesday in the same area, during a protest against the killing on Tuesday of an 18-year-old, shot by soldiers for trying to throw a firebomb on a road near a Jewish settlement.

The three deaths were the first for several weeks in the West Bank, which Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war, but tension has been rising in some parts of the territory between Palestinian residents and Jewish settlers. (Reporting by Ali Sawafta; writing by Allyn Fisher-Ilan; editing by Tim Pearce)

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