OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 21 April — The United States seems to be waking up to the tragedy of the Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank town of Jenin. US Undersecretary of State for the Middle East William Burns, who visited the camp yesterday, described it in a statement as a “human tragedy for thousands of innocent Palestinian people.”

“I just think what we are seeing here is a terrible human tragedy. It’s obvious that what happened here in the Jenin camp has caused enormous human suffering for thousands of Palestinian civilians,” said Burns, the most senior US official to visit the camp since Israeli forces pulled out Friday.

Asked if he believed there had been a massacre in the camp, Burns said: “There is no way of knowing that.” He called for aid agencies to be granted free access to the camp. “It’s important that the United Nations is going to launch a fact-finding mission to try to find exactly what happened here with the cooperation of Palestinians and Israelis,” he said. Burns was speaking hours after the UN Security Council voted unanimously to send a fact-finding team to the camp.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s spokesman, Raanan Gissin, said Israel would cooperate with the team “because we have nothing to hide.”

International aid workers at the camp said they had halted the recovery of bodies from the rubble to avoid “destroying evidence” before the arrival of the UN fact-finding team. They said their immediate focus would be on caring for survivors, as a lack of sanitary facilities raised fears of a disease epidemic.

“We decided to be extremely careful in not destroying evidence by digging the area with bulldozers ... loads of crucial evidence was already lost,” UN Agency for Relief and Work Agency (UNWRA) regional deputy director Guy Siri said.

The decision was taken as a team of Israeli-Arab doctors yesterday found a man alive 10 days after he had been buried under rubble. Palestinian medical officials said 41 bodies had been recovered from the camp so far.

Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat set up a special committee to investigate Israeli “war crimes” in Palestinian towns and villages. The Palestinian news agency Wafa said the 10-member committee of inquiry will collect and document evidence of “war crimes” in the West Bank, particularly the towns of Jenin, Nablus and Bethlehem.

The committee will coordinate with the international community over the implementation of UN Resolution 1405, adopted Friday to send a UN fact-finding mission to investigate the events in Jenin, it said. Hannan Asfur, the Palestinian minister for non-governmental organizations, was named as chairman of the committee which will include Palestinian ministers, human rights activists, academics and lawyers.

The Russian Middle East envoy Andrei Vdovin said he was shocked by “the extent of the destruction” he saw in Jenin. “It is massive devastation. I could never have imagined the extent” of the devastation, he said, speaking in Arabic to journalists. “I am here to see the damage first hand and to get testimonies from the residents about what happened here,” he said.

“The Red Cross is functioning as an observer in the Jenin refugee camp, ensuring that the Israeli forces are extracting bodies and delivering them to their families for proper burial, with respect for religious practice,” Jessica Barry said. “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.” Barry said the ICRC knew of several explosions caused by people disturbing objects lying in the debris of the camp.

Two Palestinians and one Israeli were killed in two separate incidents in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. A Fatah member shot dead an Israeli border policeman before being killed by Israeli tank fire in the northern Gaza Strip. A heavy exchange of fire followed the attack, with Israeli tanks firing shells on a Palestinian national security outpost some 500 meters away.

In the West Bank, a Palestinian wearing an explosive belt blew himself up after being asked to stop by the Israeli Army near the West Bank town of Qalqilya, an army spokesman said.