UNITED NATIONS (AP) - Secretary-General Kofi Annan (news - web sites) appointed a three-member U.N. fact-finding team led by former Finnish President Minister Martti Ahtisaari to visit the Jenin refugee camp to learn what happened there during Israel's military assault.

The other members are Cornelio Sommaruga, a former president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, and Sadako Ogata, the former U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees who is Japan's special envoy on Afghan reconstruction.
Annan said the team would have a military adviser, retired U.S. Gen. William Nash, and a police adviser, Peter Fitzgerald of Ireland.

Ahtisaari said he hopes the team will go to Jenin this week.

Arab nations have accused Israel of killing civilians in the Jenin camp, but Israel says the deaths and destruction there resulted from gunbattles between its soldiers and Palestinian gunmen. The fighting in Jenin was the fiercest of Israel's three-week military offensive.

The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously Friday to back the fact-finding mission. The vote came after Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres told Annan that Israel would welcome a U.N. representative "to clarify the facts" of what happened in the Jenin refugee camp.

"Israel has nothing to hide regarding the operation in Jenin," Peres told Annan, according to Israel's U.N. Mission. "Our hands are clean."

Israeli troops pulled out of Jenin and the adjacent refugee camp last week. Israel began its West Bank military offensive on March 29 with the aim of crushing the Palestinian militias behind deadly attacks inside Israel over the past 18 months.

PHOTO CAPTION:

A Palestinian elder pauses as he looks at the damage next to the rubble left after Israeli bulldozers toppled part of his home in the West Bank town of Jenin, Monday, April 22, 2002. After the Israeli troops withdrawal, cleaning up and rebuilding has begun again for Palestinians in West Bank cities, where children collected loose bullet cartridges and their parents checked homes and businesses to salvage what they could. (AP Photo/Elizabeth Dalziel)