U.N. Contests Israeli Version of Aid Worker’s Fatal Shooting

Once busy providing Palestinian refugees with aid, the United Nations compound here is empty now except for a few U.N. investigators piecing together the events that led to the death of their colleague, Iain Hook.

The Israeli military has admitted that one or more of its soldiers shot Hook, 54, in the compound Nov. 22, but the circumstances surrounding his death remain bitterly contested.

The military says that armed Palestinians were using the compound as a sniper nest and that soldiers fired into what they believed was enemy territory.

U.N. officials adamantly deny that. “At no time did armed gunmen enter the compound,” said Paul McCann, a spokesman for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, where Hook worked.

The angry back-and-forth is rooted in the Israeli government’s decades-long resentment of what it perceives as the U.N. agency’s support for the Palestinian political cause. The agency, for its part, sees the Israelis as careless when it comes to Palestinian civilians and those who work with the U.N. staff. The agency was created in 1948 specifically to help Palestinians who fled or were forced from their homes when Israel declared itself a state.

But Hook’s shooting in particular has heightened the tensions. His death -- the first of a foreign U.N. employee in the region since the Palestinian intifada began 26 months ago -- has refocused attention on civilian casualties in the occupied territories, which have become so frequent that the individual circumstances are often left unexamined.

On the day Hook died, Israeli soldiers shot and killed a 12-year-old Palestinian, Mohammed Musleh Balalwa, who was throwing stones at them in the Jenin refugee camp.

Five days later, soldiers shot and killed Jihad Natour, 22, as he walked through the West Bank city of Hebron banging the traditional Ramadan festival drum at 3 a.m. to wake Muslims for their pre-sunrise meal before the required sunup to sundown fast.

And Saturday, a 16-year-old Palestinian was shot and killed on his way home from school in the Gaza Strip. Witnesses said Israeli soldiers fired on some teenagers as they neared an army outpost; the Israelis say they fired only warning shots.

The search for explanations in Hook’s death confirms the difficulty of sorting out the truth.

A few facts are undisputed: Hook, an Englishman from a quiet seaside town, had arrived in Jenin six weeks earlier. A veteran of U.N. postings in Afghanistan, East Timor and Kosovo, he was accustomed to charged situations.

His assignment was to oversee a $27-million project to rebuild about 400 homes that were destroyed by Israeli forces when the Jenin camp was under siege in the spring. Hook tried to work with everyone. Staff at the Red Crescent Society, the Muslim version of the Red Cross, and at the Jenin hospital knew him, as did Israeli military liaison officers.

On the morning of Nov. 22, Israeli soldiers entered the Jenin camp in search of Abdullah Wahsh, a leader of the Islamic Jihad militant group wanted in connection with an attack on a bus that killed 14 people in October.

Wahsh’s suspected hide-out was a house less than 150 feet from the U.N. compound. A 7-foot concrete wall, topped with 3 feet of chicken wire, surrounds the U.N. offices -- a makeshift affair of three trailers set in a U-shape. A corrugated metal roof covers much of the compound’s area to shield it from the pounding summer sun.

The compound is in a typical Jenin neighborhood. Opposite one end of the compound stand the ruins of a house bulldozed by Israeli troops to ensure that its occupants, suspected Palestinian militants or their families, do not return. Next door are several buildings pocked by bullet holes. Behind the compound, a warren of narrow alleys leads deep into the camp.

Neighbors have scrawled standard camp graffiti on the compound’s walls: “Our honorable martyrs, we will avenge you,” says one message.

Residents say the Israeli soldiers stormed into the neighborhood about 8 a.m. and took up positions surrounding Wahsh’s suspected hide-out.

Several entered the home of Tafiq Farhad, just up the street and on the opposite side from the U.N. compound. A round-faced man of 36, Farhad showed a visitor one of the rooms where the soldiers took up positions.

The neat living room on the third floor has three windows overlooking the U.N. compound. The floor is littered with bullet casings, looking like spent cigarette butts; one of Farhad’s little daughters plays with them absent-mindedly. Farhad said that the casings were left by the soldiers and that U.N. officials told him not to move them.

Because much of the U.N. compound is covered, it would not have been possible to fire into most of the property from Farhad’s house.

By 9 a.m., Hook, worried about his staff, called Capt. Peter Lerner, the Israeli military’s liaison with international groups. “He wanted me to confirm there was a military operation,” Lerner said. “I said, ‘Stay inside the building, away from the windows and close to the walls.’ ”

What happened next is less clear.

Some witnesses say there were repeated bursts of gunfire from soldiers and Palestinian gunmen facing off in the streets.

Meanwhile, Palestinian civilians in the U.N. compound, some of them women and children, were unable to leave by the front gate because of the shooting and called to neighbors to help them, said Caoimhe Butterly, an Irishwoman who has been working in the camp since April.

As she came around the back of the compound, Butterly said, she saw Palestinian youths hacking with pickaxes on the wall to chip a hole large enough for people to climb through. “There had been armed resistance in that area earlier that morning, but at that time, the small number who were fighting had left,” she said.

At 12:53 p.m., Hook made another call to Lerner, which was recorded on Lerner’s voicemail, a tape made available to reporters last week. “Just making a progress report. We’re pinned down in the compound, and the shabab have knocked a hole in the wall. I’m not happy about it. I’m trying to keep them out.”

The term shabab can be used to describe youths or gunmen.

At the time, there was a lull in the fighting, according to U.N. officials. “There was no fighting for tens of minutes, maybe a half hour, before Iain was shot,” said McCann, the U.N. spokesman.

“Iain realized that armed elements were trying to gain entrance to the compound. He approached them and told them they were jeopardizing the safety of all his staff and the neutrality of the compound, and they accepted it and left.”

Absolutely wrong, say the Israelis, who contend that there was shooting from the U.N. property.

“Iain told us they were trying to get in, and on at least two occasions, there was direct fire at [Israeli] troops from the compound,” said Lerner.

He implied that Hook had been forced to give armed men entry. “This isn’t the first instance when U.N. officials were held at gunpoint by armed Palestinians,” he said.

Whatever the situation, shortly after 1 p.m., Hook walked out of one of the trailers, holding an object -- now believed by Israeli and U.N. sources to be a cell phone -- and took a step or two into the open area of the compound. A moment later, a bullet penetrated his back.

Hook’s staff called the Red Crescent ambulance service. The driver sped to the compound, only to be stopped by an Israeli tank and jeeps about 50 feet from the gate.

A U.N. ambulance, called by the agency’s Jerusalem staff, ran into the same problem. After a 20- to 25-minute delay, it went around the back of the compound, said Othman Talib, a nurse who was in the ambulance.

Hook’s body was removed on a stretcher -- through the hole in the wall that had worried him just an hour earlier.

Beyond admitting that Hook was shot by Israeli solders, the military has said little. Col. Daniel Reisner, head of the military’s international law division, said: “We want to determine if this was just a mistake that can happen in warfare, or a mistake that someone should pay for, or a mistake with criminal [responsibility].

“No one can really believe we shot him deliberately. We’d need to be extremely daft to shoot a U.N. worker. It would be counterproductive for us on every level.”

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan is demanding that Israel punish whomever shot Hook. “The issue is accountability,” said McCann, the U.N. spokesman. “It’s whether the person who shot Iain is going to be brought to justice. He was an unarmed U.N. staff member who was shot in the back. Well, we have a problem with that.”

A day after Hook’s death, Palestinians gathered to bear a symbolic coffin through the streets, covered with the U.N. flag and that of the Palestinian Authority.

“There were even more people than for the funerals of martyrs,” said Ahmed Jardadat, an emergency room nurse, referring to the highly political funerals held for suicide bombers.

“We all felt so sad, everyone in the emergency room. We appreciated the work he was trying to do for the camp.”