By Abdel Mawla Khaled (UPI 20 October 2000)
EIN el-HELWEH, Lebanon, Oct. 20 (UPI) -- Palestinian refugees protesting inside a refugee camp in south Lebanon against what they describe as Israeli aggressions against the Palestinian territories burned a U.N. flag for the first time Friday. Some 100 protestors, including women and children, staged a sit-in in the Ein el-Helweh shantytown on the outskirts of the port city of Sidon in southern Lebanon to protest the emergency Mideast summit at the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh and at the Israeli attacks on Palestinian civilians in the West Bank and Gaza.
The demonstrators trampled on a U.N. flag before setting it ablaze to denounce what they described as the United Nation's failure to stop Israel's "massacre" of the Palestinian people. In the past three weeks more than 100 people have been killed in violence between Palestinian protesters and Israeli troops; a vast majority of those killed were Palestinian. It was the first time that Palestinians vented their anger against the United Nations since Israel was created in 1948. The protestors also burned U.S. and Israeli flags and raised placards pledging to free Palestine and the holy city of Jerusalem, which both they and the Israelis claim as their eternal, undivided capital.
Sultan Abul Aynain, the Palestine Liberation Organization representative in Lebanon, told United Press International that the demonstrators set fire to the U.N. flag as "an expression of their anger and to protest the U.N.'s failure to pressure Israel into stopping its massacres against the Palestinians." Timor Goskel, the U.N. spokesman in south Lebanon, said he regretted the incident and said the United Nations was greatly concerned by the burning of its flags by Palestinian protestors.
The Palestinians later released a statement that said continued protests "proved that the Zionist peace process had failed." The statement accused the Yasser Arafat's Palestinian authority of "weakness" for its apparent failure to prevent "the continued massacre by the Zionist enemy." There are some 350,000 Palestinians who have lived in Lebanon, mostly in refugee camps, since Israel was created in 1948.