Hisham Abu Taha, Arab News

JERUSALEM, 24 May 2004 — Israeli troops raided the office of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in the West Bank town of Jenin and detained a UN official for three hours, an UNRWA statement said yesterday.

According to the statement, Israeli troops broke into the UNRWA office for the Jenin Camp Reconstruction Project on May 20, and fired a shot in the direction of the senior project manager, Paul Wolstenholme.

Soldiers then blindfolded, handcuffed and detained Wolstenholme for three hours and threatened him, the statement said.

UNWRA pointed out that this was the second time Israeli troops forcefully entered the Jenin office. On Nov. 22, 2002, an Israeli soldier shot and killed Iain Hook, then the UNRWA project manager.

Meanwhile, tanks and bulldozers backed by helicopter gunships demolished more buildings in the southern Gaza Strip town.

In the embattled Brazil area of Rafah, tank shells were fired at buildings on the district’s main thoroughfare, Abu Baker Siddiq Street, sending women and children scurrying from their homes.

At least two army bulldozers were seen razing buildings nearby, on day six of Operation Rainbow, the Israeli Army’s biggest-ever operation in the Gaza Strip which has left 43 Palestinians dead in less than a week. In the besieged Tal Al-Sultan neighborhood, which has borne the brunt of the week’s violence, Israeli tanks and troops were digging in on the outskirts and pursuing their campaign of demolition.

A number of Palestinians killed in the camp remained unburied yesterday. On a blood-stained floor in a makeshift morgue, the bodies of 16 Palestinians lay in white shrouds. The morgue has held some bodies for nearly a week because family members, sealed off by Israeli tanks in Tal Al-Sultan, have been unable to collect them. “These two are brothers,” a morgue worker said as he held open the heavy metal door of a produce freezer. “They died Tuesday.”