Obsolete

The Palestinian health ministry says the sonic booms have led to miscarriages and heart problems. The United Nations has demanded an end to the tactic, saying it causes panic attacks in children. The shock waves have also damaged buildings by cracking walls and smashing thousands of windows.

"I have never heard such a loud explosion. I thought it was right over the top of my building," said the owner, Tareq Dayyeh. "Sometimes you hear the rockets the Israelis fire but this was different. I felt like I was in the middle of a bomb. When I ran out the door I thought I might find the rest of the street was gone."

Over the past week, Israeli jets created 28 sonic booms by flying at high speed and low altitude over the Gaza Strip, sometimes as little as an hour apart through the night. During five days in late September, the air force caused 29 sonic booms.

A senior Israeli army intelligence source, who the military would not permit to be named, said the tactic is intended to break civilian support for armed Palestinian groups. "We are trying to send a message in a way that doesn't harm people. We want to encourage the Palestinian public to do something about the terror situation," he said. "What are the alternatives? We are not like the terrorists who shoot civilians. We are cautious. We make sure nobody is really hurt."

Yesterday, two medical human rights groups asked the Tel Aviv high court to outlaw the use of sound bombs on the grounds it amounts to illegal collective punishment and is detrimental to health.

"The stress is phenomenal," said Eyad El Sarraj, a psychologist and director of Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, one of the groups filing the petition. "The Israelis do it after midnight and then every one or two hours. You try to go to sleep and then there's another one. When it happens night after night you become exhausted. You get a heightened sense of alert, waiting continuously for it to happen. People suffer hypertension, fatigue, sleeplessness.

"For children, the loud noise means danger. Adults may know it's only a sound but small children feel threatened. They are crying and clinging to their parents. Afterwards they are dazed and fearful, waiting for something to happen."

The UN Palestinian refugee agency said a majority of the patients seen at its clinics as a result of the sonic booms were under 16 and suffering from symptoms such as anxiety attacks, bedwetting, muscle spasms, temporary loss of hearing and breathing difficulties.

Although the Israelis say the shockwaves do not cause casualties, doctors at Gaza's Shifa hospital said the overflights had forced women to miscarry. The number of miscarriages had increased by 40%, according to Jumaa Saqqa, a surgeon and hospital spokesman. "There were no other symptoms and the rise happened after the sonic booms. We can see no other explanation. The number of patients admitted to the cardiac care unit doubled. Some of them proved to have suffered serious harm."

Dr Saqqa said one overflight occurred while he was operating. The Palestinian health ministry estimates the sonic booms have caused at least 20 miscarriages.

The UN's Middle East envoy, Alvaro de Soto, wrote to the Israeli high command this week saying he was "deeply concerned at the impact on children, particularly infants, of the use of sonic booms".

Mr de Soto said he did not accept that the tactic was a legitimate response to Islamic Jihad and Hamas firing rockets into Israeli towns. "Sonic booms are an indiscriminate instrument, the use of which punishes the population collectively. We ask therefore that their use be stopped without delay," the letter said.

Rebekah Wade, the editor of the Sun, was released from police custody at lunchtime today after being arrested for alleged assault on her husband, EastEnders actor Ross Kemp.

A spokeswoman for Scotland Yard confirmed that Ms Wade had been freed after questioning at a south London police station and no further action will be taken. "A woman who was arrested this morning has been released and no further action will be taken by police," she said.

According to police, Mr Kemp refused medical treatment for a cut mouth when the officers attended the couple's Battersea home at 4am today.

Wade and Kemp are understood to have started the evening at a cocktail party hosted by PR guru Matthew Freud and his wife, Rupert Murdoch's daughter Elisabeth. They then moved on to dinner with David Blunkett, who resigned as the work and pensions secretary yesterday.

Wade made a "low profile" return to the Sun's offices this afternoon, according to a well-placed source. Rupert Murdoch, the proprietor, has indicated to Sun staff that he is treating the issue lightly. It seems that Wade's position is secure for now, although the paper has been receiving emails from readers hoping they will "read the full story" in the Sun tomorrow.

One senior source said the paper was expecting to run a double-page spread on the story, which will include a statement from Ms Wade. Mr Murdoch and Les Hinton, the News International boss, plan to take Wade out to dinner tonight, possibly at One Aldwych, one of their favourite restaurants.

News of Ms Wade's arrest will prove particularly embarrassing for the Sun as Mr Murdoch is in London for tomorrow's BSkyB annual general meeting.

Ms Wade and Mr Kemp, who became a household name playing hard man Grant Mitchell on the BBC soap, were married in a ceremony in Las Vegas in 2002. She had been due to attend the Women of the Year lunch today at the Guildhall.

A former Labour minister called for the contracts of two privately run child jails to be terminated yesterday after they refused access to a Home Office team investigating their use of physical restraint techniques on teenage inmates.

Sally Keeble, Labour MP for Northampton North, told the Commons that the unpublished report from the inquiry team, which included medical experts, recommended that more than 20 restraint techniques currently in use be scrapped. She said physical control was routinely used in Britain's four secure training centres, designed to hold the most troublesome 10- to 17-year-olds.

The highest use of restraint was at two centres run by Rebound, a subsidiary of GSL Limited, one at Rainsbrook, near Daventry, Northamptonshire, and the other at Medway in Kent. The official review of physical control techniques was triggered by the death of Gareth Myatt, 15, in Rainsbrook in April last year.

"I understand that these two secure training centres did not provide admission to the consultants employed by the Home Office to carry out the review of physical control in care," said Ms Keeble. "In these circumstances, the contract with the private company responsible should be terminated because they have not demonstrated that they are able to provide a regime that is either appropriate for the staff, or safe for the young people."

Ministers have modified some of the restraint techniques but decided to ban the use of only one of them - the "seated double embrace" which was involved in Gareth Myatt's death.

Contrary to the unpublished recommendations of the review team, ministers have allowed the continued use of a painful "karate chop to the nose" technique and a "thumb distraction" method.

Ms Keeble told a Westminster Hall debate yesterday that the "nose distraction" put staff at the risk of being bitten, and "thumb distraction" involved an adult hand restraining a child's thumb and had the potential to cause more injury than other techniques.

"How on earth do we, in the 21st century, manage to run a regime for young people that includes an equivalent of thumb screws?" she asked MPs.

"In at least one of the institutions, in place of the seated embrace a standing hold is used. But children are still being bent over - and it is bending that is so dangerous because this is what prevents breathing. During the course of my investigations I actually have had some of these holds demonstrated on me, and once shown, the risks are evident."

Official figures showed that restraint was used 3,289 times in 2003 and 1,228 in the first few months of 2004 in the four secure training centres.

There are 274 places in all the centres, and 322 "trainees" went through Medway in 2003 and 289 through Rainsbrook. The average age of those sentenced to detention and training orders is 14, and half of them are unconvicted teenagers on remand awaiting trial.

Fiona Mactaggart, the Home Office minister, denied there was a routine use of physical restraint in the centres and said that only a "tiny minority" of such incidents involved inflicting pain.

"We need to protect other trainees and the staff themselves in potentially violent incidents. We need to have ways that we can distract children who are behaving dangerously," she told Ms Keeble.

But she admitted that staff were increasingly using handcuffs as an alternative to the physical control techniques. Ms Mactaggart also confirmed that restraint was being used to ensure the compliance of the trainees and not just to defuse potentially violent situations.

The Loyalist Volunteer Force, one of the most reviled and unpredictable paramilitary groups thrown up by the Northern Ireland Troubles, last night ordered its military units to stand down.

The disbandment came hours after a truce was declared ending a murderous feud between the LVF and the Ulster Volunteer Force from which it broke away in 1996. Billy Wright, better known as "King Rat", founded the group after he and his associates were stood down by the UVF in 1996 following the sectarian murder of a Catholic taxi driver at the height of the Orange Order stand-off at Drumcree. Wright was shot dead in the Maze prison by republicans in December 1997.

In a six-week turf-war across north and east Belfast this summer, the UVF set out to "wipe out" the smaller splinter group, shooting dead four men it perceived to have LVF connections and attempting to murder 15 more. Many LVF members and supporters were forced from their homes.

While the group will claim that its order to military units to stand down, which took effect from midnight last night, was a response to the IRA's decision to disarm, it was under formidable pressure from other loyalists. The LVF, whose relatively small membership was centred around Portadown, Belfast and Antrim, was more a loose gang of criminals and drug dealers, which had been responsible for sectarian murders and violence.

In September 2001, it was behind the first murder of a journalist in Northern Ireland's Troubles.

Police are investigating possible LVF involvement in the murder of Lisa Dorrian, a 25-year-old shop assistant who disappeared from a caravan site in February.