HEBRON, West Bank, 1 May — The United Nations buckling under Israeli pressure decided to dissolve the Jenin probe team after the Israeli Cabinet defied the world body’s plea to allow the team to probe into the death and destruction unleashed by the Israeli Army at the Jenin refugee camp.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan expressed his intention to dissolve the team as Tel Aviv categorically said it would not allow the team to probe the Jenin massacre.
In other developments, US and British security experts sorted out the details yesterday with Palestinian officials on the custody of six activists accused of assassinating an Israeli minister, to clear the way for Israel’s siege of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat’s headquarters to be lifted.
"Within 24 hours, there will be a complete resolution and implementation of the agreement," Palestinian Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo told AFP.
British security experts visited the southern West Bank town of Jericho to assess its prison’s suitability for housing the six Palestinians wanted by Israel under the deal.
In a crack in Israel’s month-old siege of Palestinian activists in Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity, 26 people were allowed out of the church.
Half of them were members of the security forces. It was the largest such release since the standoff began but dozens of other people remain inside.
Dozens of tanks and armored vehicles started to leave Hebron a day after the army invaded the last West Bank city.
But incidents of shooting were reported close to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s besieged Ramallah headquarters yesterday, an AFP reporter on the scene said.
Palestinian Iyyad Rafidi said the Israeli troops had used him as a human shield as they searched one building.
"The soldiers pushed me around, a rifle pointed at my back, using me as a human shield," he said.
He said the soldiers kept him with them as they spent an hour searching the three-story building.
Reacting to the Israeli defiance of the UN, Palestinians called on the Security Council to impose sanctions on Israel.
"It is obvious from the objections raised by Israel that it would like to write the UN commission’s report itself," senior Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat told Reuters.
"Israel is betting that these continued delays would divert the world’s attention from the crimes it committed in the camp and other Palestinian areas...They want to bury the truth. But trying to hide the facts does not mean they don’t exist. The mission must be sent immediately," he said.
He urged Annan to send his fact-finding team to Jenin "immediately."
In a statement, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said Israel’s main condition to the United Nations was that the Israeli government alone would decide which Israeli witnesses would testify before the fact-finding team.
An Israeli political source said the government wanted guarantees that the witnesses would be immune from any war crimes prosecution arising from their testimony.
Meanwhile, according to a report carried by Asharq Al-Awsat daily, the Israeli government tried to black out the news of an aborted attempt by Jewish extremists in Jabal Zaitoun to blow up the Al-Aqsa Mosque and other Islamic monuments in occupied Jerusalem.
The paper said the military censorship in Israel, on the directive of the intelligence department, ordered all media organizations not to publish a report on the arrest of a number of Israelis carrying large amounts of explosives in an area close to the holy mosque.
In Damascus, nineteen Arab countries wound up a three-day meeting yesterday looking to revive an economic boycott of Israel, but the sessions were marred by the absence of regional players Egypt and Jordan.
Putting on a brave face, the Arab Boycott Office of Israel (BOI) announced it has compiled a blacklist of international firms doing business with Israel. But in a mark of division among those attending, it did not publish the names.
"Adequate measures" were being taken, the BOI said in its closing statement, adding that a boycott was "a peaceful, legal and noble" way of fighting Israel.
Oman’s representative, Abdullah Al-Jarwani, told AFP that 17 global firms, including some from the United States, had been reviewed, but refused to say if they had been blacklisted.
The participants studied "the means to activate the economic boycott against Israel in Arab and Islamic countries and a popular-based economic boycott of Israeli products throughout the world," the BOI said.
"The BOI urges all countries, parliaments, political parties and force who support peace to boycott Israeli products," it added.
In the West Bank, the Amnesty International said yesterday the Israeli Army’s operation in the Jenin refugee camp left about 3,000 Palestinians homeless, mostly children.
Following a visit to the West Bank camp by an Amnesty team led by Secretary-General Irene Khan, the group found "strong evidence" that "grave breaches of international humanitarian law and violations of human rights" were committed by Israeli troops during a nine-day operation earlier this month.
"Extensive demolition of houses rendered 3,000 people, the majority children, homeless," she added.
In Geneva, UN officials voiced alarm yesterday at what they called a humanitarian crisis in the Palestinian territories, shattered by a devastating Israeli military offensive.
"This is a crisis on top of an emergency, on top of a situation which wasn’t very easy to start off with," Rene Aquarone, spokesman for the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA), said.
The persistent tug-of-war between Israel and the United Nations over the sending of the Jenin UN fact-finding mission has not blocked peace activists, foreign politicians, human rights groups and legal experts from undertaking their own inquiries.
In Tel Aviv, an Israeli newspaper said Israeli soldiers were responsible for widespread vandalism and also committed thefts during their West Bank offensive against Palestinians.
The army declined to comment on the report in the Haaretz newspaper but confirmed that five soldiers were charged with vandalism or looting.
