A Palestinian minister has condemned the shooting incident involving the convoy of UN Human Rights Commissioner Mrs Mary Robinson, saying Jewish settlers were to blame.
Palestinian police and witnesses said the convoy was shot at on Sunday by Israeli soldiers guarding a Jewish settlement in the divided West Bank city of Hebron, but the army said the fire came from Palestinian areas.
"We strongly condemn this attack against Mrs Robinson's convoy," the Palestinian Justice Minister, Mr Freih Abu Middein, said before meeting the UN commissioner. "It was not just an attack against her but aimed at preventing her from implementing the UN resolution to investigate the criminal acts being committed against the Palestinian people," he charged.
Mr Einar Henriksen, head of a team of foreign observers - the Temporary International Presence in Hebron (TIPH) - said one bullet was fired and hit a TIPH patrol car. Palestinian police said the shots were fired from an Israeli army post in the city, where some 400 extremist Jewish settlers live in armed enclaves among the Palestinian population of some 120,000. However, an Israeli army spokeswoman said: "The sources of the fire were identified as coming from the areas of the Palestinian Authority."
Witnesses said that journalists covering Mrs Robinson's tour were attacked by Jewish settlers from the nearby settlement of Kiryat Arba. Some were beaten and their cars hit with iron bars.
The Israeli Foreign Minister, Mr Shlomo Ben-Ami, called off talks with Mrs Robinson after she cancelled meetings with the opposition leader, Gen Ariel Sharon, of the Likud party.
Speaking on RTE radio's News At One yesterday, Mrs Robinson said she had just returned to her vehicle when the shot was fired. "I actually saw the trace of it passing us and it lodged in the car in front. I think it was a warning shot - certainly we got out of there quite fast," she said.
"In fact we rang the Israeli military people because we needed them to escort us - the observer team are unarmed. They've never been shot at before so they were very shocked."
She had "no idea who was responsible", but added: "It may be borne in mind that the Palestinians want an observer force . . . and I was with an unarmed monitoring international observer team. They would hardly have wanted to give us a warning to go away. That's the only analysis I can make."
Mrs Robinson described as "quite extraordinary" what she had seen during her tour of "H2" - Israeli-controlled Hebron. "There are 2,000 soldiers protecting the 400 settlers and there's a total curfew on the movement of about 40,000 Palestinians . . . We were driving through a sort of ghost town, with a heavy military presence, but settlers walking around and settler children coming out of the schools [whereas] the schools of the 40,000 have been closed for the last six weeks."
It was "necessary for me to see those realities," she said, adding that it was "absolutely imperative" that the Palestinian position was fully appreciated.