Israeli army radio reported that a British UN aid worker killed Friday during clashes between soldiers and Palestinian gunmen in the Jenin refugee camp was shot by an Israeli soldier who mistook a mobile phone in his hand for a grenade.
Initial army investigations showed that Iain Hook, carrying the phone, came out of an alley from which Palestinian gunmen had been firing earlier, when the soldier shot him, army radio said yesterday. An army spokesman would not comment, saying investigations were still going on.
Hook, 50, a senior manager for UNWRA, an agency helping Palestinian refugees, was shot as he tried to evacuate the UN compound in Jenin during gunbattles that lasted for several hours. The UN was launching its own investigation into his death.
Hook's body was to be taken to a Jerusalem hospital today for an autopsy before being returned home to Britain, UN spokesman Sami Mshasha said.
During the funeral of an 11-year-old Palestinian boy also killed in the clashes, some 2,000 mourners marched through the Jenin camp yesterday, carrying an empty coffin draped with a UN flag in memorial to Hook. They unfurled banners reading, "Israel killed Hook." The boy, Mohammed Bilalu, was shot while throwing stones at Israeli soldiers, according to witnesses.
Meanwhile Palestinian militants on an explosive-packed boat blew themselves up when intercepted by an Israeli navy patrol off the Gaza Strip yesterday, wounding four Israeli soldiers, the army and Palestinians said.
The Israeli military closed the Mediterranean waters off Gaza, barring all Palestinian fishing after the attack, defense officials said. The radical group Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the blast, saying its two members on the boat were suicide attackers.
The rare seaborne suicide attack came as Israeli forces demolished the homes of four militants of the Al-Aqsa Brigades, linked to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction, near the West Bank town of Bethlehem.
Israel reoccupied Bethlehem early Friday in retaliation after a Palestinian blew himself up on a Jerusalem bus a day earlier, killing 11 people, four of them children. Soldiers have launched a wave of raids on homes, arresting 22 people, and imposing a curfew on the town. Islamic Jihad and the militant group Hamas both claimed responsibility for the bus bombing.
In the attack, the Palestinian boat entered Israeli-controlled waters off northern Gaza and was approached by an Israeli patrol boat, an army statement said.
After the patrol fired warning shots to force the boat to turn around, the boat exploded, wounding three soldiers moderately and a fourth lightly, the army said.
Islamic Jihad said its boat full of explosives rammed the Israeli patrol boat, sinking it, and that an Israeli rescue boat retrieved the four casualties. The army said the patrol boat was damaged but made it back to shore.
In a statement released in Beirut, Islamic Jihad's military branch the Al-Quds Brigades identified its militants on the boat as Jamal Ali Ismail, 21, from al-Breij, and Mohammed Samih al-Masri, 19, from Beit Hanoun.
With the incursion in Bethlehem, Israel has retaken control of all Palestinian population centers in the West Bank except Jericho -- mirroring the massive deployment that capped military offensives in April and June.
Israel says it is hunting for 30 wanted militants in and around Bethlehem and seeks to destroy what it calls an infrastructure for recruiting and preparing suicide bombers in the city.
Since Friday morning, Israeli troops have demolished six homes in and around Bethlehem, focusing on those of activists from Fatah.
In al-Khader village near Bethlehem, troops yesterday destroyed the house of Walid Sbeh, who was killed by Israeli troops in June, and of Atef Abayat, who died in October last year in a car bomb that Palestinians blamed on Israel. They also destroyed the home of Mahmoud Salah, an Al-Aqsa Brigades member who is wanted by Israel.
"It is an Israeli act of revenge, it is inhuman," Sbeh's sister, Fatima Sbeh, 24, said as she wept over the rubble of the leveled two-story house, where she and nine other women and children lived. "What did the children do to find themselves without a house?"
In Tokoa, to the south, troops demolished the house of Riyad al-Amur, an activist arrested by Israel several months ago. His wife and four children lived in the house.
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