JERUSALEM (AP) - The Red Cross handed over 60,000 pages of World War II-era documents to Israel on Tuesday and a top official acknowledged the organization's ''moral failure'' in keeping silent while the Nazis murdered six million Jews.

''Very clearly, the ICRC's activities with regard to the Holocaust are sensed as a moral failure,'' said George Willemin, director of archives for the Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross.

''The ICRC admits - yes - that it has kept silent with regard to the Holocaust, and I would say that this is the heart of the moral failure,'' he said.

The Red Cross has in the past apologized for ''all possible omissions and mistakes made'' during the war years, but Willemin's statement is the most explicit acknowledgment by a Red Cross official that the organization could and should have done more.

The documents include reports from field workers about mass deportations and killings of Jews, rulings by the organization and its governing bodies, orders to field workers, and correspondence with Nazi Germany and the allied governments.

Among the facts they reveal is that the Red Cross discounted reports of a mass murder of Polish Jewish prisoners of war at Lublin, Poland, in 1940, a Yad Vashem statement said.

The release of the documents raises anew the question of whether the Red Cross should have made public what it knew about the Holocaust and spoken out against it.

Red Cross officials have said if they had done so, the Nazis would have retaliated by stopping the organization from helping prisoners of war.

There were fears that ''the work we were doing, probably quite well, with respect to the POWs would have been jeopardized by being too outspoken about the Nazis, with dire consequences for those we were helping, without helping those we were not helping,'' ICRC spokesman Kim Gordon-Bates told The Associated Press.