CAIRO (Agencies) — Palestinians have submitted a report to the United Nations saying Israeli weapons used to quell a four-month-old Palestinian uprising contained depleted uranium, Arab League sources said on Thursday.

The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) report accused Israeli occupation forces of using artillery containing depleted uranium to shell Palestinian areas from warships and helicopter gunships.

"Apache and Cobra helicopters fired missiles of this kind at small Fateh offices in Ramallah at the beginning of November, completely destroying them," it said, referring to Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's Fateh group, the PLO's main faction.

"Bullets coated in depleted uranium were used against a group of young men affiliated to Fateh in the Ramallah area," it said, citing another incident in the West Bank town of Ramallah.

An Israeli army official denied the allegations.

"Depleted uranium is not used in airplanes or anti-aircraft ammunition. Concerning land forces, the Israeli army has not, does not and will not use ammunition with depleted uranium," an army official told Reuters.

The official said the Israeli navy had discontinued the use of ammunition around a year ago for vulcan guns which included depleted uranium, adding: "When it was in use, it was used only in the air and for expendable targets at sea."

UN wants inquiry into Israel's use of DU

Meanwhile, the personal representative of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in southern Lebanon, Staffan de Mistura, said on Thursday that he favoured an inquiry into Israel's use of shells tipped with depleted uranium in Lebanon.

"Mr. Berri is right to raise the issue of deplated uranium," he said after meeting parliament speaker Nabih Berri, adding that it is a question which concerns not only Lebanon but the whole world.

"I myself was a long time in Kosovo, Bosnia and Iraq after the conflicts where we detected strange developments" among soldiers and civilians, saying that it seemed that this new form of weapon had a particular affect on people. "Today in Italy, France, Belgium there is substantial concern about their soldiers and civilians," said Mistura.

"We should not make any alarmists feelings. We should be scientific here and elsewhere and the studies conducted by the European Union (EU) and NATO could be compared with what we can do here.

"If it is depleted uranium, we should reveal it because it is something concerning other countries.

Berri said on Wednesday he was "convinced that Israel has used shells tipped with depleted uranium in Lebanon and called for an international inquiry into the subject.

He said the Israeli media had talked of the use of depleted uranium as far back as 1985 and as fighting was then on a daily basis, the Lebanese were convinced that Israel had used Lebanon to test the weapons as it had in Palestine.

An AFP journalist saw a 66 millimetre shell marked "radioactive material" on May 4 near the bodies of two Hizbollah fighters killed in an Israeli shelling attack in southern Lebanon, less than a month before the Israeli withdrawal from the area.

The Israeli press has reported that the Israeli army used US-made depleted uranium weapons, but a military spokesman said last week "these shells were taken out of service a year earlier." He also said the weapons "were not used" in Lebanon."