Jerusalem | Saturday
ISRAEL will cooperate with a UN team that will be sent to ”establish the facts” of what happened in the Jenin refugee camp but totally rejects charges of a massacre there, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s representative said on Saturday.
”We will cooperate with this team because we have nothing to hide,” said the representative Raanan Gissin.
The UN Security Council adopted a US-sponsored resolution Friday night calling for a fact-finding team, to be appointed by Secretary General Kofi Annan to to go the West Bank camp, but it set no timetable.
Gissin said that while Israel would assist the fact-finding mission ”it considered it regrettable that the UN and the international community had not decided to inquire into the direct responsibility of (Palestinian leader) Yasser Arafat.”
He accused Arafat of using the refugee camp and its civilian population ”like human shields to protect terrorists from the Israeli army, as it had done in Lebanon in the eighties.”
The Palestinian observer to the UN, Nasser Al-Kidwa, said on Friday that ”we believe that a serious war crime, a serious massacre was committed, and that some people will have to be held responsible and may be brought to justice.”
Israel has denied all allegations of a massacre.
”There was not a massacre in the camp, but a very hard battle which cost of lives of 23 of our soldiers in a camp which had become the capital of Palestinian terrorism,” Gissin said.
”According to our estimates there would be about 50 Palestinians killed,” he said, adding that 10 bodies ”had been booby-trapped to explode when Israeli soldiers went to evacuate them”. – Sapa-AFP