Israel accepts UN probe of shattered Jenin camp

10.40

Israel has promised to co-operate with a UN mission to probe its crushing assault on the Jenin refugee camp, saying it has nothing to hide in the face of Palestinian accusations of a massacre.

Palestinians said they hoped the UN Security Council's unanimous decision on Friday to send a "fact-finding" team to the camp could lead to an international criminal trial of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and other senior figures.

"We have nothing to hide and we will gladly co-operate with this UN inquiry," Raanan Gissin, a spokesman for Sharon, said after the United States proposed the compromise UN resolution.

Watching camp refugees dig in rain-soaked rubble for bodies and possessions, the US assistant secretary of state for the region, William Burns, called Jenin a "terrible human tragedy".

A Jenin hospital official said the body count in the refugee camp had risen to 39 but added that it could climb to between 200 and 400. Israel says about 70 Palestinians died, mostly fighters. Twenty-three Israeli troops were killed in Jenin.

There was no end to the standoff between Israel and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat following the failed peace mission last week by US Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Israel rejected an offer from Arafat to try the suspected killers of an Israeli cabinet minister in a Palestinian court.

At the Jenin camp, Burns told Reuters: "It's obvious that what happened here ... has caused enormous human suffering for thousands of Palestinian civilians" and urged that relief workers be allowed full access.

He declined to comment on whether he saw evidence of a massacre. Israel denies any massacre, saying its troops tried to minimise casualties in what was a "hornets' nest of terrorists".

An Israeli army spokesman said its forces had withdrawn from the camp except for some soldiers extracting bodies for burial. The International Committee of the Red Cross was observing.

"It took six days for the Israeli army to let us into the camp but now we have fairly free access on a daily basis," said Jessica Barry, an ICRC spokeswoman.

But while the army said it had left Jenin and its downtown camp, it remained deployed around them to keep "terrorists" from slipping out into nearby Israel, and slapped a curfew on three villages close to the "Green Line" boundary.

International officials have urged Israel to lift curfews where fighting has stopped to ease access for relief agencies and help civilians start to rebuild their lives.

At the United Nations in New York late on Friday, delegates voted unanimously for a US-drafted resolution to send a "fact-finding team" to Jenin, after Washington threatened to veto a measure put forward by Arab states that had called for a formal UN "investigation" of "massacres" in the camp.

The stench of rotting bodies still wafted from debris in the camp's flattened heart, site of the worst fighting of an Israeli offensive began on March 29 after Palestinian suicide bombers killed scores within Israel.

"This is the first step towards making Sharon stand trial before an international tribunal," Palestinian Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo said after the UN vote.

He also demanded trials for Defence Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer and Shaul Mofaz, the Israeli army's chief-of-staff.

It remains, however, highly improbable that the United States and Israel's other Western allies would support any move to make Israeli leaders face an international trial.

"We have found 38 bodies so far -- 11 in the first days of the fighting. The assessment is that there are a few dozen more bodies under the rubble," an army spokesman said on Saturday.

With relief workers and human rights activists in the camp, Israeli Arab nurse Wael Omari stepped on something that exploded and blew him off his feet, breaking his leg in a jolting reminder of the dangers of unexploded ordnance and booby traps.

Israel has said the army will also quit the city of Nablus by Sunday but stay at Arafat's compound and near the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem until standoffs with militants end.

"There's no progress so far," Bethlehem's mayor, Hanna Nasser, told Reuters, but added that high-level discussions were going on involving European, US and Vatican officials.

Israel demands the surrender of militants among more than 200 people, including gunmen and foreign clergy, holed up inside one of Christianity's holiest sites since April 2.

Sharon has said he will keep tanks around Arafat's battered headquarters until suspects wanted for the October assassination of Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi are handed over.

Arafat's offer to have a Palestinian court try the suspects was the first acknowledgement they were in his compound and appeared to be an attempt to break out of his confinement.

Gissin demanded the suspects be extradited to Israel. But a senior Palestinian official again rejected the demand.

In the Gaza Strip, largely quiet during Israel's West Bank blitz, a Palestinian militant shot dead an Israeli border policeman at the Erez junction with Israel before being killed by return fire from an Israeli tank, an army spokeswoman said.

At least 1288 Palestinians and 453 Israelis have died since a Palestinian revolt against occupation in much of the West Bank and Gaza Strip erupted 18 months ago after talks on a permanent peace accord collapsed.

- REUTERS

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