British Envoy Duped by Propaganda, Israel Says

Israeli officials said Tuesday that a top British diplomat had fallen for Arab propaganda by criticizing as “an affront to civilized values” conditions at a Palestinian refugee camp he toured in the occupied Gaza Strip.

Avi Pazner, spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, said Tuesday that British Minister of State for Foreign Affairs David Mellor was ill-informed. “It is a bit surprising that a visitor to our country expresses his views in such a way with only a very partial knowledge of the situation,” he said in a British Broadcasting Corp. radio interview.

And Israel’s charge d’affaires in London, Moshe Raviv, on Monday night rejected the criticism from Mellor as unbalanced. He added that it could aggravate problems in the occupied territories, where Israeli troops have killed at least 24 Palestinians since Dec. 9.

But a Foreign Office spokesman said Tuesday that Mellor’s remarks reflected British policy. “It is in line with much of what has already been said,” said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

After touring Jabaliya, where 52,000 Palestinians live, Mellor told reporters: “Conditions here are I think an affront to civilized values. It’s appalling that a few miles up the coast there is prosperity and here there is misery on a scale that rivals anything anywhere in the world.”

Pazner blamed Arab countries and the Palestine Liberation Organization for the situation in the camps, saying they have prevented any solution to the refugee problem “for their own selfish political reasons.”

“I can assure you that Israel has been trying for many years to improve the lot of the refugees living in those countries,” he said, “. . . but there has been opposition to that by Arab countries, by the PLO, because (they) want to use these camps as tools for their propaganda to impress people with little knowledge of the situation in the area.”