Posted on 08/12/2004 9:52:47 PM PDT by yonif
UNITED NATIONS - Israel accused the Palestinian Authority on Thursday of misleading the United Nations by including a youth gunned down by Palestinian militants on a list of people killed by Israeli forces.
Hassan Jamil el-Zaneen, a teenage resident of the Gaza Strip town of Beit Hanoun, was killed by Palestinian militants on July 22 after he tried to stop them from using his family's yard to fire Qassam rockets into Israel.
Islamic Jihad and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades took responsibility for the slaying but then issued a statement asserting that "Hassan Jamil el-Zaneen fell a martyr" during a clash between militants and Israeli soldiers.
An Aug. 9 letter to the UN Security Council and Secretary-General Kofi Annan from Palestinian UN observer Nasser al-Kidwa listed the boy among 59 Palestinian "martyrs" who had been "killed by the Israeli occupying forces" between July 8 and August 6. His letter was made public on Thursday.
The allegation that el-Zaneen was among Palestinians killed by Israeli armed forces was "blatantly false," Israeli Ambassador Dan Gillerman said in a letter to Annan and the Security Council, a copy of which was given Reuters.
"The international community is very familiar with the perverse misrepresentations and outright fabrications in Palestinian statements," Gillerman's letter said.
The Palestinian UN mission had no immediate comment.
The two letters became public a day after militants killed two fellow Palestinians near the West Bank town of Ramallah when they prematurely detonated a bomb near an Israeli military checkpoint packed with Palestinians in cars and on foot.
Israeli police said the bomb was destined for Jerusalem.
Al-Kidwa has written to Annan and the Security Council 196 times in the past four years to detail Israeli actions during a Palestinian uprising that began in September 2000.
He said the latest killings brought to 3,162 the total number of Palestinian dead at the hands of Israeli forces.
The United Nations said on Wednesday that 3,553 Palestinians and 949 Israelis had been killed in the uprising.
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