The top UN human rights official said yesterday Palestinians living in the Gaza strip had suffered "massive" human rights violations.

Louise Arbour, the UN high commissioner for human rights, travelled to the town of Beit Hanoun, where Israeli artillery killed 18 members of a single family two weeks ago as they slept in their house. She said she would use a five-day trip to the region to call on Palestinian and Israeli leaders to stop further violence. "The violation of human rights I think in this territory is massive," Ms Arbour said as she toured the town in the northern Gaza strip. "The call for protection has to be answered. We cannot continue to see civilians, who are not the authors of their own misfortune, suffer to the extent of what I see."

She met members of the Athamna family who survived the attack and who showed her photographs of their dead relatives. Even as she travelled through the town Israeli troops were operating in another area of Beit Hanoun, tearing up fields from which militants launch crude rockets at Israel.

The Israeli military said a fault in its artillery was responsible for the shelling of the Athamna family. The incident came after a week-long Israeli military operation in Beit Hanoun which itself left more than 50 Palestinians, among them many militants, dead and which was intended to stop rocket fire into Israel.

However, militants continue to fire their Qassam rockets into Israel, mostly aimed at the town of Sderot, where a woman was killed last week. She was the first person to die from a Qassam rocket attack in more than a year.

At first the violence in Beit Hanoun appeared to have encouraged rival Palestinian factions to restart negotiations on forming a national unity government. Last week a university professor was named as a probable compromise candidate to be the new prime minister. However, senior figures in the Fatah movement, which lost power in elections earlier this year, said yesterday that the discussions had broken down again, as they have several times over the past five months.

Others from Hamas, which now runs the government, said negotiations were still proceeding, but many Palestinian observers say the chances of an agreement are slim. Even if a coalition government is agreed, it is by no means certain that it would help lift the economic boycott that was imposed on the Palestinian Authority earlier this year after Hamas was elected to power.

Separately, dozens of Palestinians gathered at the home of a Hamas militant, Wael Rajab, in Beit Lahiya, in Gaza, yesterday after the Israeli military warned it was planning an airstrike there. The protest was the third such demonstration in the past three days aimed at preventing Israeli airstrikes. The Israeli military in recent months has telephoned militants to warn their houses are about to be hit.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2006

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