Ambassador C. Mahendran, Sri Lanka's permanent representative to the United Nations and chairman of the special committee to investigate Israeli practices, told delegates that there was "a sense of hopelessness, frustration and anger'' expressed by Palestinians appearing before the body.

The anger, he said, was not only directed at Israel but also at the international community, including the special committee, because of their inability to relieve the hardships experienced by Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territories.

The three-member committee, which has been chaired by Sri Lanka since it was established by the U.N. General Assembly in 1968, has been barred by Israel from visiting any of the occupied territories.

The committee, which consists of U.N. envoys from Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Senegal, has continued to hold sessions in Cairo, Amman and Damascus, where witnesses provide harrowing accounts of life in the occupied territories.

The 19-page report provides testimony from scores of witnesses who say that Israeli forces have entered hundreds of private homes searching for wanted persons and arms, damaging or destroying the houses and household property.

During the first three months of this year alone, Israeli military forces demolished more than 200 refugee shelters and damaged more than 2,000 others in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

Mahendran said that the human rights situation in the occupied territories has deteriorated enormously since Israel's military incursions following the Palestinian uprising in September 2000.

Since then, more than 1,300 Palestinians, including children, have been killed and over 20,000 injured, compared with the killings of over 650 Israelis.

"The committee says extensive controls and the severe manner in which they have been enforced by Israeli authorities are ''totally inconsistent with human rights standards and obligations''.

They are also in breach of a number of provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the protection of civilians in time of war,'' the study said.

The most pronounced Israeli military attack was on the refugee camps in Jenin and Nablus between April and June this year, where 54 people were killed and hundreds left homeless because of the destruction of property.

In a 76-page report released last month, London-based Amnesty International (AI) said that Israeli forces committed "war crimes'' in Jenin and Nablus, killing Palestinians unlawfully, blocking medical care, torturing prisoners, bulldozing houses, and using men, women and children as human shields.

Quoting from eyewitness accounts, the report described incidents where unarmed Palestinian civilians were shot to death in custody or while in their homes.

In another incident, the AI report cited the case of eight members of a single family who were killed, including three children, their pregnant mother and an 85-year-old grandfather. The deaths followed the Israeli bulldozing of a house in Nablus.

But Arye Mekel of Israel said that the U.N. special committee had done little more than produce "hostile propaganda against Israel''.

"The root cause of the special committee's bias lay in its very name, which presupposed that Israel's action violated the human rights of Palestinians, even before it had undertaken any investigations to determine if that was the case,'' he said.

Most shocking of all was the committee's "non consideration'' of the impact of ''Palestinian terrorism'', not only on the Israeli people but also on the Palestinians themselves.

Israel, he said, faced the "incredible dilemma'' of confronting terrorists that hid themselves among civilians.

Mekel also said that the report failed to consider ''the effects of Palestinian terrorist campaigns on the human rights of the people of Israel, more than 650 of whom had been deliberately murdered by Palestinian terrorists''.

Ambassador Hasmy Agam of Malaysia, a member of the special committee, said he regretted the refusal of the Israeli government to cooperate with the committee.

But the committee, he said, was fortunate to have obtained the views of a number of Israeli citizens who worked in the field of human rights and had volunteered to appear before it. (This article by the author originally appeared in the IPS news service.)

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