Israeli forces delay ambulance while UNRWA project manager dies in jenine
Palestine-Israel, Politics, 11/25/2002

Ian Hook, a senior UN official from Britain was shot dead Friday the West Bank refugee camp of Jenin as Israeli soldiers who circled the camp denied immediate access to the ambulance, doctors and witnesses said.

The victim was identified as Ian Hook, 50, head of a UN project to rebuild homes in the camp, totally destroyed during an Israeli incursion.

The Director of Jenin Hospital, Mohammed Abu Ghali, has said the bullets retrieved from the victim's abdomen were of the kind generally used by the Israeli forces.

Hook was the coordinator of a US$27 million Jenin camp rehabilitation project for UNRWA, the UN agency that helps Palestinian refugees.

Hook and several other UN officials were in a small UN compound, consisting of several mobile homes, when the fighting erupted, said a UN spokesman.

An 11-year-old Palestinian boy was also killed and an Irish national wounded in different incidents in the camp, witnesses and a Palestinian human rights group said.

In New York, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Friday voiced serious concern about Israeli actions in response to the shooting of the UNRWA project manager. While the full circumstances surrounding the death of Iain Hook have yet to be determined, a spokesman for Annan said the Secretary-General was "greatly disturbed" by the fact that the Israeli army refused immediate access for an ambulance which had been summoned by UNRWA to take the victim to the hospital.

"The Secretary-General has on a number of previous occasions called on the Israeli army to allow ambulances unimpeded access to the sick and injured," spokesman Stephane Dujarric recalled in a statement to the press in New York.

Annan, who expects to comment further on the matter, extended his condolences to the victim's family.

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