Jerusalem ? Israeli soldiers shot and killed an unarmed, 19-year-old Palestinian man Thursday who entered an aging military base in the northern West Bank hours before the army vacated it, Palestinian security officials said.

Allah Khamtouni and nine other Palestinians went into the Dotan base near the Palestinian town of Jenin mistakenly thinking it already had been abandoned, Palestinian officials said.

Israeli Col. Shmulik Kalmi said Khamtouni ran into the base with a group of people. Soldiers fired warning shots in the air, but the infiltrators did not stop, he said. Fearing the Palestinians might have had an explosives belt, the soldiers fired at Khamtouni’s legs, but he bent down as they fired, was hit in the shoulder and died, Kalmi said.

Both the Israeli army and the Palestinians said Khamtouni was unarmed.

Late Thursday afternoon, the last troops left Dotan and Palestinians flooded in, grabbing what debris and construction materials they could, before Palestinian police opened fire on the scavengers, wounding three in the legs, witnesses said.

The rundown base was retained in service as a staging post as part of Israel’s forced evacuation last month of the nearby Homesh and Sanur settlements. Settlers evacuated two other settlements voluntarily.

The Dotan incident came a day after Israel’s domestic security chief, Yuval Diskin, warned that Palestinian militant activity in the West Bank was likely to increase in the wake of Israel’s pullout from the Gaza Strip. Diskin said Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas did not have the ability to control armed Palestinian groups following the withdrawal from Gaza and four settlements in the northern West Bank.

Also Thursday, an Israeli court convicted Abbas Sayad, the commander of the Hamas military wing in the West Bank town of Tulkarem, of masterminding a March 2002 suicide bombing that killed 29 people at a Passover holiday meal at the Park Hotel in the Israeli resort town of Netanya.