OCCUPIED TERRITORIES

ZMAG: Roadmap To A Concentration Camp by Mahir Ali

The toll continues to rise. A couple of weeks ago, gunfire from an Israeli tank cut short the life of award-winning British journalist James Miller. He and reporter Saira Shah - the two of them had collaborated on Beneath the Veil, a ground-breaking documentary on the plight of Afghan women under the Taliban - were filming the demolition by Israeli forces of a house in Rafah, on the Gaza Strip, when he was shot in the back of the neck. "Local kids who loved him have built a shrine on the spot where he fell," writes Shah, "and the Palestinian Children's Parliament held a march in his memory."

Last month Tom Hurndall, a 21-year-old English peace activist, was shot in the head by an Israeli sniper while he tried to protect a five-year-old girl at the same refugee camp. He went into a coma from which doctors don't expect him to emerge. Last week Hurndall's parents were on their way to visit him at Rafah when the British embassy convoy they were travelling in was briefly detained at gunpoint at a Gaza crossing.

About six months ago, Iain Hook, a former British military officer in charge of an UNRWA project to rebuild the Jenin refugee camp, died when an Israeli sniper shot him in the back. Jack Straw promised a thorough investigation into the shooting, but the British Foreign Office has since resiled from that position. An inquiry by the UN was assigned to a former US naval intelligence officer whose blatantly pro-Israeli report proved unacceptable to Hook's colleagues and other UN staff. A second report is being treated as classified. Israel assured Straw it would provide a full account of the killing, but has now changed its mind.

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