Jan Egeland's comments came as foreign donors met in Stockholm to discuss aid to Palestinians living on restricted aid after Hamas's election victory.

The hosts say they are trying to meet a UN appeal target of $330m (£174m).

On Thursday, donors nearly doubled expectations of aid when they pledged $940m of help to rebuild Lebanon.

About 50 of the countries and organisations which attended Thursday's Lebanon aid conference were expected to stay on to discuss the Palestinian situation.

Inadequate water

Earlier this year the US and European Union froze aid to the Palestinian Authority because Hamas has refused to renounce violence and recognise Israel.


A limited flow was later restored, though aid workers say it is not enough.

Since late June, Israel has also been conducting a large-scale military offensive in the coastal Gaza Strip, after Palestinian militants captured an Israeli soldier.

More than 200 Palestinians have died, while 11 Israeli civilians have been wounded by rocket fire from Gaza.

Mr Egeland said the Palestinians needed at least as much aid and money as the Lebanese, adding that 1.4 million Palestinians were "living in a cage".

"The border crossings are really closed. They cannot get anything out, this is crippling their economy," Mr Egeland said.

"There is not enough electricity, there is not enough water. There are social conditions on an intolerable level at the moment.

"So we need more money but we need also a political solution to this war."

'Hatred and bitterness'

Jan Eliasson, Sweden's foreign minister, said the conference aimed to raise more pledges for a UN flash appeal launched earlier this year.

So far, about 39% of the target of $330m has been raised, he said according to Associated Press.

"The humanitarian situation is critical," Mr Eliasson was quoted as saying.

Unemployment is high, and in Gaza, the UN says nearly 80% of people live in poverty.

One aid worker who returned from Gaza 10 days ago warned that malnutrition was widespread and many new mothers were unable to breastfeed their babies, reports the BBC's Alix Kroeger in Stockholm.

Instead, they were making up bottles with a third of the recommended measure of formula and topping them up with starch.

The result, the aid worker said, would be lifelong damage to those children.

Mr Egeland also warned that, in the 25 years he had been visiting the Palestinian territories, "I've never seen so much hatred and bitterness as during my last visit there."

He urged both Israel and Palestinian militants to cease hostilities.

Witnesses said Israeli planes dropped leaflets over Gaza City on Thursday morning, telling residents that militants were responsible for the closure of border crossings between Israel and Gaza and warning them not to "offer any help to terrorists who are making your daily life very difficult."

Palestinian militants, meanwhile, renewed their rocket fire at Israel, with at least seven Gaza-made Qassam rockets landing in and near the southern Israeli town of Sderot. A warehouse was hit and set on fire, but no one was injured.

In the West Bank, Israeli soldiers shot dead a senior member of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades early Thursday during an arrest raid in the northern West Bank city of Nablus, medical officials said.

An army unit entered the city in pursuit of militants and engaged some of them in a gunbattle, killing one and injuring several others, some critically, Rafidya hospital in Nablus said.

The dead militant was identified as Fadi Qfeishe, 30, a leader of the military wing of the mainstream Fatah movement, who had been sought by Israel for several years.

Israeli defence officials said Qfeishe was the most senior bomb maker in the West Bank, responsible for assembling the bomb belts of nearly all suicide bombings committed in Israel in the past year.

Also in Gaza City, a group of masked Palestinian gunmen ambushed and shot dead the northern Gaza head of the militant Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) group.

Raed Nakhal, 30, was the northern Gaza commander of the PRC's armed wing, the Salah a-Din Brigades.

The PRC is one of three militant groups, led by the armed wing of the governing Palestinian Hamas movement, behind the abduction of Israeli Corporal Gilad Shalid which triggered Israel's wide-scale offensive in Gaza

Most of the people who had come to the distribution of WFP rations actually seemed pleased with what they'd received: a gallon of cooking oil, lentils, canned veg, bread and high-energy biscuits. The bread - huge discs of unleavened Lebanese "khibez" - had been baked earlier at a Beirut bakery with flour provided by WFP.

We were in Haret Hreik, one of the areas of south Beirut worst hit by Israeli bombing raids during the recent conflict. Thousands of families in this largely Shia Muslim suburb had fled as huge bombs rained down on their neighbourhoods, turning 10-floor apartment blocks into smouldering piles of rubble. Now, two and a half weeks after the end of the conflict between Israel and Lebanon's Hizbullah militia, people are returning to south Beirut and other affected areas to pick up the pieces of their lives.

They are people like Heyam Safa, an elderly woman whom I met at the distribution in a side street deep inside Haret Hreik.

"My flat was completely destroyed," she said as she sat on a wall, clutching her bag of rations. "I lost everything, even my medicine which I need because I'm sick. Now I sleep in the home of a different neighbour every night."

Given all they've been through, there's a resilience and good humour among these people that's impressive. The first time I visited the suburb, Ali, a local businessman and elected municipal official, took me on a tour of the devastation. After eight years in Boston, buying and selling Levi's, Ali speaks excellent English. He took me to see his drive-in car wash, or what's left of his car wash: twisted metal sheeting and smashed machinery.

When not overseeing the clean-up of his wrecked business, Ali is helping organise food distributions and other municipal enterprises. He seems to be in constant motion, talking to four people at once: to his left, a woman who wants her ration package now - "Now, do you hear? I can't come back tomorrow" - and, to his right, three irate Palestinian residents who don't have the necessary documents to qualify for rations.

The back street where the distribution is going on is a haven of peace compared to the main thoroughfare, which is jammed with slowly moving cars and dump trucks full of rubble. Some areas are intact but, in others, dozens of buildings seem to have been targeted.

Bulldozers and power drills are hard at work among huge mounds of broken concrete. Poking from between the slabs are bits of broken furniture, smashed washing machines and other household items. Amidst all the dust and noise, people can be seen picking through the debris, trying to salvage a few personal belongings.

At the former perfume shop in the side street where the distribution is taking place, the last packages are being handed out. More food will be distributed tomorrow. The authorities of the four municipalities in south Beirut reckon they'll be giving WFP rations to more than 100,000 people during coming weeks.

"We've got a tough time ahead," says Ali. "But we're also tough. We'll make it."

Following a solidarity mission to Israel last week, leaders of the Rabbinical Council of America issued a statement prodding the Israeli military to review its policy of taking pains to spare the lives of innocent civilians, in light of Hezbollah's tactic of hiding its fighters and weaponry among Lebanese civilians. Because Hezbollah "puts Israeli men and women at extraordinary risk of life and limb through unconscionably using their own civilians, hospitals, ambulances, mosques... as human shields, cannon fodder, and weapons of asymmetric warfare," the rabbinical council said in a statement, "we believe that Judaism would neither require nor permit a Jewish soldier to sacrifice himself in order to save deliberately endangered enemy civilians."

The directive from the Orthodox rabbi comes at a time when both Israel and Hezbollah have been subjected to intense scrutiny from the media and from international human rights organizations about the Lebanon war's grueling impact on civilians. Israel has taken the brunt of the criticism, with the number of Lebanese civilians killed in the month-long conflict put at about 1,000.

Civilian deaths on the Israeli side, which totaled 43, were markedly lighter despite Hezbollah's steady rain of rockets over heavily populated towns and cities in Israel's northern region. Defenders of the Jewish state say that Israel has been unfairly blamed for Lebanese civilian deaths, which, they contend, are largely unavoidable given Hezbollah's practice of hiding in innocent people's homes.

Condemnation of Israel by international groups for inadvertently killing civilians when targeting terrorists "has happened in all of the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts, but this has brought it front and center in very clear ways that everybody now sees," said Marc Stern, general counsel of the American Jewish Congress.

"You can't conduct a war in Lebanon without killing civilians," he said. Stern added that Hezbollah is part of a cadre of groups, including Hamas and the Sri Lankan rebel group Tamil Tigers, which live within the general population, making it impossible to wage war on them without attacking civilians.

At the United Nations, the Lebanon war has sparked renewed debate over the enforcement and usefulness of international humanitarian law, which governs wartime conduct. The newly assembled United Nations Human Rights Council, which replaced the U.N. High Commission on Human Rights after years of allegations that the body was ineffective and anti-Israel, recently authorized an investigation of alleged Israeli war crimes in Lebanon. The 47-member council opted not to look into war crimes on the part of Hezbollah - a decision that has prompted accusations that the council is dominated by its Islamic member states.

Kofi Annan, the U.N. secretary general, has condemned civilian deaths on both sides of the conflict, and is considering opening a "commission of inquiry" under the auspices of his office that would investigate possible war crimes by both parties.

Some Jewish organizations have criticized the U.N., saying that the 192-nation group and the cohort of charities that carry out humanitarian work on a global scale place too much emphasis on laws protecting civilians. Among the aid groups criticized has been the International Committee of the Red Cross, which is charged with promoting adherence to international law.

The AJCongress sent a letter August 7 to the president of the Red Cross, Jakob Kellenberger, assailing the international organization for its "selective reading" of international law. According to Stern, both the U.N. and the Red Cross have failed to address Hezbollah's commingling with civilians as a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, while both international bodies continue to castigate Israel for a disproportionate military response.

At the same time, the AJCongress is waging a campaign to amend international law, which it views as out of step with fighting terrorism. In a letter sent in mid-August to the Senate Armed Service's Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities, Stern wrote that "international law, as it is currently applied by the United Nations, the Red Cross and unofficial international human rights groups, enhances the military capability of irregular forces at the direct expense of states and thus exacerbates the difficulties of nations engaged in asymmetrical warfare." In an interview with the Forward, Stern said that given the stipulations of Additional Protocol 1 - a 1977 amendment to the Fourth Geneva Convention that, among other caveats, excuses "irregular" fighters from wearing military attire - Western nations are at a distinct disadvantage in waging wars.

As Jewish groups rush to defend Israel's conduct in Lebanon, a feud has erupted in recent weeks between Human Rights Watch, an international organization that monitors human rights abuses, and a handful of Jewish leaders who have countered the international watchdog group's assessment of Israel's behavior throughout the conflict. That debate was sparked by the release in early August of "Fatal Strikes: Israel's Indiscriminate Attacks Against Civilians in Lebanon," a report by Human Rights Watch detailing more than 20 instances of Israel's killing of civilians - including an attack on Qana, which claimed the lives of at least 28 Lebanese, among them 16 children - as the war raged during the last two weeks of July. Despite Israel's insistence that it limited its targets to areas where Hezbollah fighters were known to be operating, the rights organization says that in the cases of civilian deaths that it investigated, no evidence emerged to suggest a Hezbollah presence.

The controversy over the Human Rights Watch report has largely played out in the editorial pages of The New York Sun, a neoconservative daily established by Seth Lipsky, the Forward's founding editor. Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, published an opinion article in the Sun chiding the human rights group for failing to consider the existential threat that Hezbollah, as an agent of Iran and Syria, poses to the Jewish state. A heated back-and-forth ensued between Kenneth Roth, the rights group's executive director, and the newspaper, which published its own series of editorials accusing Roth of anti-Israel bias. Roth and the Sun's managing editor, Ira Stoll, debated the issue on an episode of the television program "The O'Reilly Factor."

Alan Dershowitz, a professor at Harvard Law School and the author of "The Case for Israel," issued harsh rebukes to Human Rights Watch in opinion pieces that appeared in the Sun and on the left-leaning blog the Huffington Post. Dershowitz, who along with many Jewish communal leaders has long maintained that Human Rights Watch disproportionately singles out Israel for human rights abuses, cited examples of reporting that illustrated Hezbollah's hiding behind civilian targets. In an interview with the Forward, Dershowitz said that Human Rights Watch has lost all credibility as a neutral organization. "Human Rights Watch has become part of the problem, not part of the solution," he said.

Roth shot back that his critics, including Dershowitz, have mischaracterized the report. "There is a shocking lack of factual engagement by the reflexive defenders of Israel. They will focus on irrelevancies, they will twist what we said, but nobody takes on what we actually said." According to Roth, his organization has never denied that Hezbollah places its weapons in civilian areas. "What we found was that the Israeli government's cover story was to blame all civilian deaths on Hezbollah hiding between civilians, but it didn't explain these deaths," he said. Meanwhile, Roth may find support for his stance among some college and high school students affiliated with the Union for Reform Judaism, American Jewry's largest synagogue movement. A loose coalition of 48 Reform Jews, culled from universities across the nation, earlier this month sent a letter to the president of the Union for Reform Judaism, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, calling on the movement to condemn the Israeli military's "killing of unarmed Lebanese and Palestinian civilians, as well as its premeditated targeting of civilian infrastructures, which has put additional lives at risk and hampered relief efforts."

Matt Adler, the Washington University in St. Louis liaison for Kesher, the college branch of the Reform movement, said that he circulated the letter because he felt that his views were not being voiced in his movement's policies and public statements on the Lebanon war. "While we certainly agree with condemning Hamas and Hezbollah's attacks, we didn't see more of a pro-peace statement reflected," Adler said. Adler, 20, also said that he was "thrilled" by the Reform union's swift response. The same day that Yoffie received the students' plea via email, he wrote a letter, saying: "No side is completely blameless in a war, but I am confident that the government of Israel has taken all reasonable precautions to avoid civilian casualties."

In an effort to continue the dialogue, Adler said, the Union for Reform Judaism has scheduled an August 28 conference call between the signatories to his letter and the leadership of Arza, the Reform movement's Zionist arm. "I think we're going to see what comes out of that call for what our next steps are going to be," he said.