I call to you! I clasp your hands. I kiss the ground beneath the soles of your shoes. … I give you my eyes as a gift And I give you the worth of my heart For the tragedy which I live Is my share of your tragedies…

(From a poem written by Palestinian poet Tawfik Ziad, put to music and sung by Lebanese musician Marcel Khalife. A salute from a Palestinian in exile to those inside Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, struggling to free Palestinian lands and lives from Israeli military occupation, it is one of Palestine's most popular resistance songs.)

Jenin (pronounced jeneen) shares the same Arabic root as the following English words: cover, hide, conceal; descend, fall, become night; demon; garden; paradise; obsession, madness, insanity, rage, fury, rapture; protection, shelter, shield.

[Hans Wehr, A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic]

I went to Jenin Refugee Camp because I heard that people were being killed there by the Israeli army, and that the wounded were dying because the Israelis refused to allow them to be attended by doctors. I walked most of the way from the village of Salem, and arrived in the camp on the afternoon of April 14, 10 days after the Israelis had invaded. The day I arrived, I was told, it was the first day the Apache helicopters stopped dropping missiles on the camp. I was able to enter the camp before the UN or the Red Cross, before most journalists, and before any of the other local or international relief or human rights organizations. I walked in, carrying no camera, and wearing the white vest of the United Palestinian Medical Relief Committees.

In Palestine, it's not hard to distinguish a refugee camp from other towns and villages. Despite the fact that the dwellings are not tents, as you might expect from the word "camp"; nor their appearance in any way indicative of the transitoriness one associates with a camp -- many have been in existence for over 50 years, of course -- a camp is unmistakably a camp. The houses will be smaller, closer together, poorer looking. The streets will be narrower. There will be fewer stores in the dense cluster of living spaces. There will be more children, more people of all ages, than in other places. The streets, even if they are paved somewhere underneath, will often be covered with a fine layer of sandy sediment, as if the environment itself, and not just the human world, is busy trying to cover up the camps, put them out of mind. The air will be dustier, less clean. In a camp one does not find the sparkling contrast of color one finds in other parts of Palestine -- silvery green of olive tree, deeper fig or grape leaf green, rosy pointed rooftops atop light golden stone…. There is less green in a camp, fewer trees, flowers, growing vegetables. No sunny yellow roses in May, no crimson poppy faces in March or April. A camp, with little room for the prized Palestinian garden, seems all one tone -- a dusty beige. The rooftops are not varied, some pointed; all are flat -- the traditional, cheapest style, that promises most usefulness for hanging clothes or building upward. Even textures are muted: the buildings are built not of nubbly, variegated stone, but of concrete, uniformly smooth, washed to a pale pastel. Ordinary building materials being unavailable, it is not surprising to see ribbed metal sheets, plastic, or even cloth, used to create at least a part of a shelter. In a refugee camp, there will be more animals --sheep, goats, chickens -- living in quarters close to humans. Means of transportation will include fewer cars.
It was not, then, difficult to be sure the exact moment I left the village of Wadi Burqeen and entered for the first time the refugee camp in Jenin. All distinguishing characteristics were present -- except camp residents. No children, no adults were to be seen. The lower portion of the camp, toward the bottom of the hill on which the camp is built, was completely empty. Not a human being was to be seen or heard, not in the streets, not in a single doorway. Not one face appeared in a window. No cart, no car moved. The streets were perfectly empty, of people and animals. In the unnatural silence, in the unnatural stillness, however, another sense on which most of us depend less often was stimulated overpoweringly, taking up the attention usually directed to sound and movement. It was the olfactory sense, and what it smelled was death.
The smell of death is unmistakable the very first time one encounters it. No one needs to be told what this is: every human pore, every cell, every hair follicle strains away from it. It is as if only when smelling death do we humans recognize our kinship, and in our revulsion at the smell, reject death -- for ourselves, and for friend and enemy alike. The smell of death rode on the still, dusty air; it snaked out of open doorways that led into black spaces; it rose from the rock and dirt and water running in the streets. Between the smell and the lifelessness, the lower part of Jenin Refugee Camp seemed a place of Plague.
Each dark doorway opened on the same scene of destruction, every bit and piece of human artifact wrecked or destroyed -- mirrors, bathroom fixtures, kitchen cabinets, televisions, smashed, broken, opened, contents spilled out onto the floor. Salt, beans, lentils, rice, scattered on the floors amid the shards of glass from the smashed containers they'd been kept in. Organic matter, glass, metal, cloth, plastic, tin -- all damaged in the ways each can be damaged. And no one home. All gone, and nothing tidy. In Wadi Burqeen, they'd told me that residents of the lower camp, near its outer edges, had fled or been forced out when the soldiers first entered; and so it seemed. Only the smell of death belied the story: clearly some had died where they were, and since been moved. But where? Thus occurred the first of so many questions with which the dreadful Jenin tapestry is woven.

There were still tanks and soldiers in the camp, and the curfew continued unbroken for days more after I arrived. Each time they saw me, the soldiers stopped me and questioned me, but often let me pass. If they said no, I mostly walked a longer way around. Sometimes I walked by them anyway. They didn't shoot me. They told me to watch out for mines.

It was high up the steep hillside on which the camp is built that the first Palestinians could be seen. A group of people, of different ages, a family probably, were sitting inside what was left of their house. Most of the walls lay in ruins around them, and the roof of the house had apparently been blown off, or caved in. Taken back at the sight of one another, for a moment, we just stared. Then I waved, and gestured round the back of the ruined building: was that the way in? They nodded, their arms describing the same semicircle mine had made. I headed round the back, and out of sight.

Before I could get to them, though, another family had appeared at another "window" in a blown-open wall. They waved at me and gestured urgently. Through the shards of peach-colored half-moon tiles littering the alley I picked the way they showed me, until I came to an opening in the wall wide enough to serve as a door. In I stepped. Inside the dark recesses of the house -- the "heart" of the house, as person after person described where families hid during the Israeli invasion -- inside this broken concrete cave where they had for weeks without electricity or gas been subsisting on dwindling quantities of uncooked food and water -- with smiles and hugs and exclamations of wonder and surprise, we greeted one another. Bright eyes looked into mine; wide smiles met my own, little hands reached for my larger ones. Twenty-five, all together, they were, a young man explained; mostly women and children, as I could see, but a few young men too, still in danger of being killed or taken by the soldiers. In the immediate neighborhood, called Al-Damaj, there were about 200 more camp residents, the young man estimated, all in the same situation -- trapped, living in wrecked or ruined houses, hungry and thirsty, still fearing for their lives. On the pad I offered him, he wrote his name and the name of the quarter, so that I could find them again, bringing the precious supplies. I asked them if they had water, and they said no, but still, in impeccably polite Arab style, tried vigorously to refuse the bottle I left them, while offering, again and again, to make me coffee. It was a measure of how little they had that I was not offered a choice -- coffee, tea, cold drink -- and served one or another, even if I said no. But the form remained in place, lacking only the drink itself.

"Aren't you devastated?" my mother asked me when I telephoned her once. And no, I wasn't -- no, not yet -- and neither were the people I met those first hours and days in the refugee camp in Jenin. The human spirit, which can grow so twisted, or so slack, here in this refugee camp stood spare and straight and tall, amid death, and ruined lives. People generated love, and sheer will to endure, and I skated on it all, walked with them, unfathoming, as the pain unfolded. It is now I am less whole. And hardest to bear is the knowledge of that generous spirit, of how it contrasts utterly to those opposite human qualities which stabbed at it so savagely, trying to bring it low. If Palestinians' hearts had not shown themselves so large, mine now would be less sad.

From this quarter, high on the hilltop, I began the descent, unknowing, into the most ruined areas of the camp. Still, the streets were silent, except for the cries of chickens or pigeons, trapped in their wire cages. Let them out to search for food and water where they could? But they were someone's living. I decided to wait. Down the winding roads, here and there, a human being emerged cautiously from a house, a woman or a child, even a young man or two, and asked: "Do you want to see the bodies?" then led me into yet another blackened shell of a house to view the bodies enshrined there. Up broken concrete stairs, into a room emptied of everything but concrete rubble fallen on -- on what? a corpse burnt black to the bone, no longer male or female, a skeleton head sticking out from the debris, eye sockets facing up. Up more stairs -- where was the other body? The woman who led me felt sure she'd seen it here before. "Where is the other body?" she asked, reappearing in the doorway. "Oh"; she led me back up to a room next to the first -- another corpse, burnt to the bone, and the stench of burned flesh powerful as the image now burnished on the mind's eye. I found I, like my guide, had my hand up, unconsciously rude (and wholly ineffectual) attempt to block mouth and nose, as we turned away.
Six bodies I saw that first day, two burned to non-recognition, the rest at least partly clothed, some broken and bloody, in rag doll positions, insides spilled outside, most swarming with flies and maggots, all reeking with the smell of decomposing flesh. The one that was most popular in the Israeli press, I later found, was the man's head, burned black, skeleton mouth grinning, capped with some kind of military helmet, the only piece of soldierly gear I saw worn by a Palestinian the whole time I was there. If I had come for injured people, I had come too late. Milk for babies, water, food, in that order, came the replies to my question: What do you need? The injured had joined the dead.
Down through the devastation I slowly made my way, that first afternoon, amid the smells of death and smoke, until a young man appeared from around a corner and led me to the house I asked for, belonging to Muhammad Abu Al Haijeh, in charge of Palestinian Medical Relief Services for the camp. Or rather, the young man took me to the house of a neighbor where Muhammad, along with his mother and his wife Tahahni, along with other neighbors, were staying, since Israeli soldiers had occupied their house and rendered it unfit for human use. There I was warmly greeted. This was, I learned, "Harat al-Sumran", the Neighborhood of the Blacks. Indeed, it might have been a corner of upper Egypt or Sudan, so black were the skins of a goodly number of the residents there. Entering the quarter was like twice coming home, to two familiar cultures, Arab and African, a double welcome.

First, then, water, food, and medicine. Since I knew neither the camp nor the town, Muhammad arranged for a human relay chain to guide me the first time to the city of Jenin. Great care would be needed: the Israelis were still in the camp, and still shooting. For safety's sake, each person would be a short link in the chain, going just a few houses, before passing me to the next guide. So I was handed through the narrow streets from house to house, by women or children (less likely, it was hoped, than men to be shot), until, in the care of two young women, aged 14 and 15, I arrived at a hospital just outside the camp, where a fire truck, soon loaded with supplies, was ready for the taking. To make short work of the story, we did not succeed that night in getting the truck past the soldiers. It was not until next morning the two stolen teenagers could be returned home to anxious aunt and mother. From that night on, I went alone, on foot, carrying only what I could carry, from the "storehouse" United Palestinian Medical Relief Committees (UPMRC) had in the city of Jenin up through the empty streets of the camp. Much was stored in Muhammad and Tahahne's house. They had moved back in: most of the glass and broken plaster had been swept up, and the human excrement had been scraped and scrubbed from the sitting room shelves and carpets where the Israeli soldiers had deposited it. For the next two months, Muhammad and Tahahne's house served as a distribution point for food and medicine and as a temporary medical clinic, as soon as camp residents could begin to move about. But that was still some time off. For the moment, people were trapped, in their houses or in the ruins of their houses, or under their demolished houses -- in which some were found alive, and most dead.

As I walked about, those who dared to, called to me, or moved about quietly so I could see that they were there. Fifty in one house, a dozen in another, 16 here, unknown numbers there. I handed bottles of water, canned babies' milk through broken walls, climbed up concrete stairs that had been blasted or bulldozed so that they were slanting backwards; using them involved hauling one's weight up and down by hanging onto the still relatively anchored iron rail. Arriving at a second story, I could hand up canned food to yet another rooftop to young men who came to receive it. Down below, in a building blasted open on two sides, I could see women and children hiding there, in the "heart" of the house; they could look up at me. We smiled and waved. Later, I learned there were others who saw me from the first day, but who never let me know they were hiding in the ruins. Wherever I went, the soldiers could follow. Hungry and thirsty though they were, some, the young men knew better than to take the chance.

When I raided the camp's already Israeli-ravaged pharmacy for medicine for one child's skin rash, I gathered up handfuls of candy to bring the little ones. But some of the children, when I finally appeared among them, full size, no longer just a miniature human peering through an opening, cried and ran and hid their faces in their mothers' skirts. I looked too much like the occupier. Despite the goodies and their parents' reassurances, I remained for one or two of the smallest an object of terror.

The first day the International Red Cross was allowed in by the Israeli Army, they were most concerned to find any who were injured. I came upon the white jeep bearing the red cross as it was stopped on its way into the camp, its driver talking to a contingent of soldiers. The soldiers had seen me coming and going, of course, for days; and one of them motioned me over to the car. Would I show the Red Cross where the living were? he wanted to know. Of course, I said, but not if the soldiers came along. The medical/military convey chose to go without me; Red Cross jeep and Israeli armoured cars headed up the hill, while I continued down. That night, up on the hillside, in the direction they had gone, came sounds of Israeli gunfire.

Always, people ask about Jenin: how many were killed? There is no way to know.

The first day I entered the camp, I saw six bodies. The second day I saw seven. The third day, I saw four bodies, and was shown two feet, sticking up out of the sandy rubble an impossible distance apart from one another, one right, one left, both bare, both ankles wearing the remains of socks in matching colors. The same person, then. Adult feet, soles to the sky. Sometimes I was led by smell. As the days went on, and more camp residents dared to venture for short periods of time out of their houses, I was shown the human remains by adults or children. Often people knew the names of those whose bodies we found, and always they knew whose house the body was in or near. If the skeletons were not burned clean of flesh, then flies and maggots were at work doing the job. Or chickens. Later, when the curfew on the camp was lifted, and people were digging in the sites where their houses had been, bodies appeared more and more piecemeal. In the Medical Relief office one evening, I saw a black plastic sack brought in by young volunteers, then quickly removed from the room at a stern word from the doctor. Following, I was shown a portion of an adult human torso, along with a tiny foot, belonging to a child of probably three or four. One day, on one of the streets that had been most enlarged to allow easy passage for tanks and bulldozers, I found an odd, grey, sack-like thing. I might not even have recognized it as a once-living being had not the smell announced the fact unambiguously. But what was this thing, gritty, elephantine in texture as well as color? It was nothing that I knew. A day or so later, Dr. Muhammad Abu Ghali, director of Jenin Hospital, located right on the edge of the camp, identified it as tanked-over human remains. So many times had the tanks or bulldozers passed over what had once been a human body that it had been reduced to a sack of crushed bone and muscle. Another similar object was uncovered from beneath the debris by a bulldozer some days after. Most of the bodies left behind intact for us to find were men's bodies. But a good number belonged also to women, and some to children. A noticeable number belonged to men or women who were handicapped, either physically or mentally. Some were not discovered until some weeks had gone by -- like the body of the mentally ill woman discovered on the roof of the house where she had been living, thigh bare, knees drawn up to her chest in the fetal position. She had been killed by one of the missiles the Israelis fired on the camp by helicopter. Some bodies people that knew must be there had still not been found at all, by the time I left the camp. Like the body of the 38-year-old man, both mentally and physically handicapped, who was crushed when his home was bulldozed on top of him. His mother had run out, when the soldiers came with their bulldozer and called the residents out of the home. Up to the soldiers she had rushed, clutching a picture of her son, showing them, begging them not to bulldoze the house until he could be gotten out. No such luck: down went the house, and that was the last the couple saw of their son. For most of the time I was in Jenin, the couple, whose house had been situated on what had become a main camp thoroughfare, could be seen daily digging for their son. At last his wheelchair, bent and broken, was uncovered and then, incongruously, hung from an upper story window of a house still standing across the street. A kind of memorial.

So some people were killed by missiles, dropped by helicopters. Some were shot, by gun or tank shell, or burned to a crisp when their homes were set afire. Others were killed when their homes were bulldozed on top of them. Some bled to death of their wounds, while medical vehicles and personnel were prevented from going to them. One might think it would not be so difficult to discover how many were killed during the invasion. One would think that would could simply get a list of all the residents from the United Nations Works and Relief Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNWRA), which is in charge of the camps, then subtract the names of the missing ones. But it was not so easy. The Agency did have a list of names, and as the weeks went on, attempts were made to register the names of the living. But some of the men who had been in the camp during the invasion were from the city of Jenin or from villages in the area. How many had there been from outside the camp? And who were they? The biggest problem was that no one knew how many people had been arrested, and the Israelis were not saying. Not only that, but the Israeli government slapped an 18-day moratorium on lawyers' visits to any who had been "detained" or arrested -- and then promptly extended the time period. To this day, no one can be certain who was arrested and who was not. Without this vital information, no one can know for sure how many were killed.

A host of other factors further cloud the truth. Most effective was the complete information ban the Israeli Army enforced before, during and after the killing. The area was closed to journalists, medical and human rights organizations and all others well in advance of the invasion, and for a week after it. The day after I entered the camp, journalists were allowed into a limited area of the camp for a viewing of what soldiers said was a "cleaned" area. In that area there were no bodies to be seen. A human rights worker who ventured without permission outside the "cleaned" area saw ten dead bodies, in the short time she stole before discovery. Throughout the invasion, ambulances were shot at if they tried to enter the camp. Outsiders were not the only ones the Israelis tried to keep from witnessing the carnage. Camp residents were shot, or their houses bombed if they so much as made a sound or showed a head in a doorway or an open window. No noise was allowed; neighbors in one house could not call to those in another. No one was allowed to move in the streets or on their roofs.

Despite these efforts to contain the news, camp residents did see bulldozers sweeping the area. They saw refrigerator trucks enter the camps, and saw them leave again -- trucks identical to those later seen in the Jordan Valley in closed military areas, in "terrorists' graveyards." Some were sighted in northern Israel as well. At one point, the Israeli High Court issued an order to the Army to stop removing Palestinian bodies from the camp. But neither human rights workers nor journalists nor area residents have ever been allowed to have a look at these places the trucks were seen. In extensive interviews after the invasion, we learned, further, that residents of the camp had in many cases snatched a moment when they hoped they would not be seen, and hurriedly buried the bodies, bloating and rotting after days of exposure, in their own backyards, or wherever they could escape Israeli eyes. Later, when the closure was lifted, some of these bodies were dug up and taken to Jenin Hospital, for reburial in the camp cemetery. Were all of them found and dug up? Or are some still there, in the camp, uncounted? The hospital director called for all body pieces to be brought to him; but none of the body pieces I saw ever turned up there. Even if they had, it would have taken a forensic pathologist to learn whose they were. But there was no forensic pathologist. When several of us asked the UNWRA head about the need, he asked us, volunteers all, why we didn't arrange for one. When we asked him if the UN would take seriously the findings of any forensic investigation, if we could find someone to work with us, he answered that this was not the UN's job.

Originally, when I entered the camp, I thought it would be time-consuming, but possible, to find all the bodies, or parts of bodies, buried under the rubble. This did not happen, for several reasons. For one, I was told by the Canadian liaison between the International Red Cross and the Palestinian Red Crescent, that dogs could not be used, as they were in other places, to locate dead bodies, because the bodies had been either tanked over or dragged back and forth across the camp by bulldozers, to such an extent that they could not be traced by smell. The smell of decomposing corpses was everywhere throughout the area. For another, the Israeli invaders and the Palestinian resistance fighters, between them, had left, intentionally or not, a large amount of unexploded ordinance in the camp. These bombs and booby traps were responsible for the explosions we heard in the camp daily for weeks after the Israeli Army had left; and they were the cause of many an injury -- loss of limbs, terrible burns, even death. They got in the way of the special Norwegian and British rescue teams' search for survivors -- and for the dead. Refused permission either to bring in their own bomb-defusing equipment or to use Israeli equipment, the teams left after a couple of days, unable to do their work. Finally, the careful sifting through the rubble which would have had to be done, given the scattering and fragmentation of body parts, never occurred. Again, when asked if his organization would be taking the one-story-deep rubble to a special area and combing through it for human remains, the UNWRA head told us this was not the UN's job. It turned out to be no one else's either. The UN official did tell us that plans might be made to deposit the rubble in an open field, in case anyone did want to go through it. This has not yet been done. Meanwhile, the decomposition process continues, speeded up by the swift-arriving summer heat. The more time goes by, the less the evidence will be of the dead, until finally there is none at all.
"…cover, hide, conceal; descend, fall, become night…"

Evidence remains in plenty, for other sorts of activities. It is, for instance, not allowed under the laws of war, as embodied in the Fourth Geneva Convention, to prevent people who are injured from receiving medical care. (Israel, of course, claims they are not bound by the Convention (since they technically took the West Bank and Gaza, not from their original inhabitants, but from the governments of Egypt and Jordan). Testimonies are abundant of medical relief workers who were shot at when they tried to enter the camp in answer to residents' calls for help. The ambulances, shot at, in some cases disabled or destroyed, are testimony of another sort. And finally, the camp residents themselves cite instance after instance of family and neighbors bleeding to death after being injured by gunshot, missile, or tank shell, or after having their houses being bulldozed on top of them.
Soon after my arrival in the camp, I was told by neighbors of a man who had called them several times on his mobile phone, saying he was buried under the ruins of his house. The last call had come two days before; and though they had tried to call the man again and again, he had not answered. Perhaps he was still alive, the neighbors told me; perhaps only the battery on his mobile phone had died. I went to look for him. I found the location of the house, and even found the top portion of unmistakable bathroom tiles sticking up out of the rubble; the man had said he was in the bathroom. A young woman appeared at my side as I began digging: "A man is here! A man is here!" she kept saying, as we clawed at the earth with our hands, calling the man's name. Given our frantic efforts, we actually got some way down into the area where he must have been buried; but when we stopped each time to listen, we heard only silence. Only when the stench of death swarmed up to choke us, did we give up our search. Amal, for this was the young woman's name, accompanied me for days after that as I went on my rounds throughout the camp. Slender, serious, stern even, this young one, of only 14, soon put on a Medical Relief vest. She was the first of the volunteers to join us, and among the most courageous and dedicated of any I have ever seen. The first day the Israelis lifted curfew in the camp, and people packed the hillside, digging in the rubble, lifting a spoon, a photograph, a bloody pillow, while bulldozers groaned and scraped for human remains, she was first to hug me when I cried.
So the question became, not only: how many died, but how many who had died of injuries, of suffocation, could have been saved, had medical relief workers been allowed in? Surely, there must be some formula, some expected ratio of wounded to killed, in any attack of war? There was, a reporter assured me -- three to one.

Also considered unacceptable in international circles is killing unarmed civilians, or summarily executing fighters who have surrendered. But witnesses told us of these things. And witnesses were not hard to find.

We worried about these witnesses, in fact, some of us who interviewed them. For one thing, our interviews were rigorous. No detail was allowed to pass unchecked, unchallenged. If it turned out that the person who was speaking had not seen or experienced the happening him or herself, we tried to find someone who could verify it first hand. If we could not find anyone, we struck it from our record. So speaking to us did not make for smooth telling. In addition, we worried because once we found a witness who described some awful event, we could be sure that others either had already or would come and find the same person, asking him or her to tell the story countless times. How could someone go through telling the story to a stranger once, not to mention many times?

At the same time, I noticed that speakers typically showed little emotion in the telling. A man described, voice and manner expressionless, the killing of his unarmed son, at a soldier's whim: And then he shot him, with many bullets, and my son fell. And I fell beside him, and lay with his blood flowing down the sloping concrete toward me, until I was lying in a great mess of it. And there I stayed, for five hours, while the soldiers moved around the house. I stayed there so that they would think I was dead. His daughter-in-law heard the gunshots and guessed her husband and his friend, and maybe her father-in-law, too, had been killed. She could not go to them, just outside the gate that led to the inner courtyard where the women and children had been locked. She spoke calmly, her lovely face serene. What could carry her through this? How could she speak with such gentleness, without apparent grief? I hoped the early tellings were useful, somehow, to those who talked to us. In any case, it was clear the tellers had built a protective shield around themselves, which even the words they spoke themselves could not penetrate. I know I did the same.

Another common story told, not only in Jenin Refugee Camp, but throughout Palestine, in these recent months of invasions, another which goes against international humanitarian standards, involved the using civilians as soldiers' human shields. Again and again, we heard testimonials of families' being herded into one room of a house or apartment, while soldiers took over the rest of the building, and used it to fire from at those outside. Alternatively, soldiers took a civilian, male or female, old or young, and made that person go door-to-door throughout the camp, battering open the iron gates, or standing with the soldiers while they burst them open with some explosive device. After the door was opened, the civilian had to enter the house, in front of the soldiers, and precede them from room to room, so he or she would be the one to receive the blast of any explosives planted or any bullet fired by Palestinians inside.

One of the more chilling aspects of the entire Israeli military occupation of Palestinian lands has for me been always what I call, for lack of better words, the human face of the occupation. By this I mean words, gestures, actions in which the soldier steps out from behind the impersonality of his mission to reveal the individual within. An idiosyncratic behavior that could not be confused with any military order. In those moments, the abstract congeals into feeling, from pettiness to outright brutality, to which none of us, in our shared human-hood, can claim to be a total stranger.

So why set off the explosive to blow open the door, calling, "Come out, and open!" before learning that the one coming to open it was a woman in her thirties, unarmed? Why blast her eyes and cheek onto the wall opposite her, and her teeth onto the ground, for her sister and mother to find? Why walk atop the corpse, laughing? Why walk on the shoulder of the man you have shot, when you could walk around? Why put your gun to the head of the two-year-old and ask him if he is ready to die? Why ride the tank, over and over, across the dead body until it becomes a chunk of elephant meat? Why point the weapon at the retarded boy, accompanying his grandmother to hospital, and blow him to kingdom come? Why make an old woman in the crowded room urinate and defecate on herself, instead of allowing her to use the bathroom, why prevent her son, who moves to help her, from wiping her clean?

War, we think, and we think something abstract. Governments. Armies. A Reason. War is an abstract word. (And yet -- can we call this war? -- in Palestine, there is just one army. Doesn't war take two?) Separating the abstract into the living strands that make it up can be terrifying. The horror is in the details. War is terror personified.

"…demon; obsession, madness, insanity, rage, fury…"

No one had any doubt that Israel's war against the Jenin was personal. First of all, of course, there is Sharon's personal vendetta against his old enemy, Arafat. Jenin is a part of Palestine. But the refugee camp in Jenin stood for even more. During all that particular invasion (there have been so many now) in all the West Bank cities, 29 Israeli soldiers were killed. Of these, 23 were killed by fighters from Jenin Refugee Camp. As such, in Israeli eyes, the camp was a cancer of recalcitrance in the stubbornly rebellious lands. To the residents of the camp, Jenin Refugee Camp, in Arabic, "Mokhiam Jenin", was "Kandahar". (Balata Camp, in Nablus, was "Tora Bora.") To them, Jenin was a bastion of resistance to the continuing occupation of their lands. One person's repugnance, another's dignity. Further, residents of the camp in Jenin had to a large extent built their camp, and to a large extent managed it. There was a sense of community, whether expressed in orderly streets or a helping hand, which made the people proud. Although originally, and ever, from Haifa, many residents of Jenin Refugee Camp had grown to love their home, and not just for the lovely fertile fields and orchards, famous throughout Palestine, in which it lies.

"…garden, paradise;…protection, shelter, shield …"

But now -- what had they? Sometimes I tried to tell people what I saw they had. I told them they had big, generous hearts, strong spirits, a knowledge of injustice and her opposite twin, and that these were greater gifts than all the material commodities the world could offer. Such presumption, when so much had been lost! But they nodded, they knew. And I tried to rally them to alternative forms of resistance to the powers that blocked their freedom.

Everyone - that meant men and boys -- I spotted smoking? cigarettes made in the US, I harassed mercilessly. L&M, Marlboro, Viceroy: whenever I spotted the familiar pack pulled out and drawn from, I pounced. With each cigarette, you pay for F16's, Apache helicopters, bombs and bulldozers, I told them. With each cigarette, you help pay for the occupation of Palestine. At my most obnoxious, I would snatch the pack and pretend to throw it on the floor or out the window. Inevitably, a hand would reach up, as though involuntarily, to save the precious item, even though many agreed, nodding thoughtfully, as if considering the fact seriously for the first time.

Others protested, "But these cigarettes are better than the others!"

"Hmmph!" I'd snap. "Do you know what this is?" I'd produce the aged, wrinkled envelope that had once held loose rolling tobacco made by Holland's Drum. Opening the pouch, I'd pull out a clump of the moist, blonde tobacco for them to see. "This," I'd announce proudly, "is tobacco from Jenin. Whoever buys this supports, not Snake's Head, but Palestine!" Then would follow a lively debate, inevitably ending in a harangue by me on the greater virtues of rolling one's own tobacco - health, expense, politics -- especially the mild Brazilian leaves processed in Jenin. In the last few weeks I was in the camp, as I opened my mouth and reached out a hand, I was shown, with increasing frequency, that the neatly rolled cigarettes inside the pack marked with the US brand name were not US at all - but machine - or hand-rolled cigarettes of tobacco from Jenin. Many men were rolling them in little hand machines at home and stuffing the Palestinian cigarettes back into the used packs, for greater ease of carrying. "Arab tobacco," they would pronounce; going one better than I, for the tobacco they were smoking, rather than being imported from Brazil, was grown in Jenin.

Children, of course, being omnipresent in the refugee camp, heard all this exchange. In one neighborhood, there grew up a little band who greeted me by calling out, in Arabic, of course," Where's the tobacco from?" a ritual in which my role was to shout, with even greater vigor: "The tobacco's from JENIN!", over and over, as I made my way past the dumpster parked outside their houses, the one that smelled so bad. I know that it would have been far better to have been advocating no tobacco at all, but that was the best I managed.

Each time I approached the area of that particular dumpster, the terrible smell of whatever was inside was sweetened by the children's chorus, repeated, in the way of children, again and again each time I appeared, and continuing till I was out of earshot, a ritual of which none of us, not they or I, ever tired.

-- Where's the tobacco from?

-- The tobacco's from JENIN!

As the days went on, and people's need for easily accessible water only increased, I often found Hassan thirsty as he searched in the rubble under the hottening sun for his family's money, identification papers, his mobile phone. The first day I met him, passing the slanting concrete slab topping the pile of rebar, broken wall and other rubble that had once been his home, I had been looking for his brother, to arrange an interview. Seeing Hassan, who looked so much like him, though older and fiercer looking, I stopped and greeted him. That day, he happened to be furious - exhausted, frustrated in his search, despairing of the future, thirsty. "I will bring you water," I promised, having no clear idea where I'd get it from, since certainly no supply was near, and water gathering hadn't been my plan that afternoon. "When?" Hassan spat the words out bitterly. "After a year?" Weeks had gone by, even since the camp had "opened to outside help"; and still the great piles sat, blowing asbestos, concrete dust, and the smell of death into people's clothes and skin and lungs. Still no equipment had come to help people search through rubble for remains of persons or possessions; Hassan and his brother had, all these days, been doing it with the nails and skin of their own hands. And each day the sun was getting hotter. I could imagine his anger.

Usually -- now that the camp had become more porous to outsiders, and small groups or straggling individuals of foreign appearance had arrived, from France, Italy, the US, Holland, Spain, to volunteer their help -- I turned to these foreigners for help in hauling food and water. But this day, I saw none nearby; and Hassan's words - a year, eh? -- I had naturally snatched up as a challenge.

As I wandered about, searching for a non-Palestinian face, a mountain of children called to me from the highest point in the shattered landscape. Up with their posters and Palestinian flags on the very point of a concrete slab, they waved and called: "Chips! Chips!" The fact that my name was known in the camp was due , far more, I knew, to the fact that it's not everyday one gets the chance to call a grown-up a potato, than anything to do with me. "Chivvis", a strange name in any language, except, presumably, Welsh, easily becomes "chips" in a land where the term for "French "fried potatoes is the English "chips", as in "fish and --", and where kids know some television character called "Mr. Chips", who I've not yet run into. I waved back and called hello; then, after a second's scrutiny for strength and height, called to them again. "Want to come with me to get water?" I shouted across the distance, as no self-respecting Palestinian adult would do. Fortunately for me, the children were just the right age - seven, eight, nine, I guessed -- for a venture of such dubious appeal. "Yes!" came the cry, and the multi-colored mountain unformed itself and began squirming erratically toward me. We headed toward one of the two places where I knew water could be found - down the hill, outside the camp, in a building in Jenin where the UN had stored many bottles of water and a lot of powdered baby milk, until it could distribute them. The only problem was, I couldn't exactly describe to the children where we were going, since I wasn't sure myself. Finding the place would be a matter of luck. So when they asked, "Where's the water?", instead of answering, I echoed the question in a kind of chant: "Where's the water?", which has a sort of nice ring to it in Arabic. One of the children added, "Where are the bisqueet?", a generic term for any sort of packaged cookie, so we added that, and shouted the refrain as we trudged along. Until the day I left, weeks later, I'd hear some little voice cry, "Where's the water?" as I moved through the camp, which the response "Where are the bisqueet?" seemed to satisfy. Hassan, for his part, on receiving the water we brought him, became one of my staunchest promoters to visitors to the camp. One could always tell at a glance those Palestinians who either did not live in the camp, or who had not been inside it during the invasion. One, lesser way was often by their grooming and their clothes, marked contrast to those of us who had been living for weeks without running water. But it was the faces that struck me -- shocked, and outraged, as the faces of those who had lived through and survived the events were not. These newcomers, from Jenin City or from villages around, on seeing for the first time the terrible destruction wrought by US planes, bombs, and other export commodities, and on seeing someone from the US wandering about, sometimes let loose in my direction words that were angry, though certainly never rude or unjustified. Each time this happened, camp residents who had seen me in early days carrying food and water into the camp, took it upon themselves to defend me vigorously. "She was the first one here!" they'd assert to the newcomers. "She brought in food and water!" And, typically exaggerating the compliment, "She opened the camp!"

As the weeks went on, the mood in the camp changed, as grief moved through its inexorable phases. After the initial numb amazement at the miracle of their collective and relative survival, came the Time of Anger. Tempers were short; angry words were exchanged here and there. There was grumbling at the slow delivery of food and water, and at the shortage; one young man killed another, it was said in a fight over food. Those who heard of the killing shook their heads in sadness. Even the little ones sometimes fought.

A couple of times, when I found young ones arguing, I urged them : This would be useful for Israelis, if Palestinians fought each other, were divided. But you belong together, and together you will be strong. And -- ever amazing to me, who come from the West, the boys would listen to this adult, even one from outside their culture, unclench their fists, and, for the moment at least, let their anger go.

Meanwhile, children, many without shoes or books or notebooks, which had been burned or destroyed or buried under the ruins of their homes, were going back to school - in double shifts, due to the lack of classrooms due to the destruction of schools by the Israeli soldiers.

What did you learn? I asked of the three girls of ten or twelve who stopped by to visit me each morning after the early shift. That day, they 'd brought a rose. Did you learn anything today? Oh yes, they assured me eagerly. They had learned how to recognize some of the unexploded ordinance still lying around in the camp to blow off a hand or a leg or put out an eye or two. In the first weeks after the camp had opened up, we heard several explosions each day, as some person was injured, blown apart or badly burned, by these unexploded bombs, parts of missiles, grenades.

Finally, the camp, an entity in its own right, this living, breathing soul, moved to yet another plane in its saga of grief. Indeed, it is possible that the largest blow dealt the camp in the Israeli invasion was that experienced by that phenomenon we call community. Many -- an estimated 4,000 -- had been forced to leave: their homes were unlivable, those not completely demolished about to be. The UNWRA set up tents for them, packed close, in rows, just outside the camp; but these had no water or electricity, and I'm told still no one has moved into them. A thousand shekels would be allotted to each family whose home was completely destroyed, the UNWRA official told me. I repeated the amount (about $225) to make sure I had heard him right. I had. An Arab country in the Gulf, he said, had promised to contribute more. By the time I left the camp, about a month after I had arrived, most of the now two-time refugees had gathered their few remaining possessions and left, to stay temporarily with relatives or friends outside the camp. They'd ridden away in borrowed trucks piled high with bedding, kitchen pots, bits of clothing, a refrigerator that was not too badly damaged, a wardrobe, packed sawdust covered with a thin veneer that years before had begun chipping off due to water damage and decay. The belongings they took with them were better than nothing; better than the nothing they would be able to spend to buy other containers to hold the things they had. Those who still had jobs and who were still able to work returned to their jobs. Those who have not been able to work return each day to sit in the camp, I was told by a Japanese journalist who came back recently. UNWRA, he said, is paying their rent, those who must live in town, but some of the apartments they live in have nothing in them at all. Not furniture, not a pot or a pan or a stove. Faced with the awareness, daily deepening, that it will be years, if ever, before their community is rebuilt and its spirit strengthened, the people of Jenin Refugee Camp have touched the face of Despair. Being Palestinian, having lived the lives they have, they will not stay with her. They were able to laugh in their hardest time. They will continue to fight, to sing, to endure. Above all, they will depend on themselves -- on God -- as they have always done.

Listen to me

I did not give up in my country
I didn't shrink my shoulders
I stood face to face with my oppressors
An orphan, naked, barefoot
I have carried my soul in my palm
I have not pulled down my flags
And I have protected the green grass
Over the graves of my ancestors.
Listen to me… I clasp your hands!

One day, they will be free.

"…rapture …"