JENIN REFUGEE CAMP — When they found the body it was in pieces and so they gathered it all up out of the rubble, great chunks of blackened rotting flesh with bits of bone sticking out, and piled them up on a blanket. The smell made us wretch and stumble away gasping for clean air. The Palestinians said the pile of putrefying flesh and bone was Mohammed Massoud Abu Sb’a.

The people of Jenin refugee camp returned to look for their dead Thursday amid the devastation that the Israeli Army had made of their homes. The destruction here is more devastating than an earthquake yet the Israelis have not allowed any heavy lifting equipment in here so the Palestinians dug out the bodies Thursday with their bare hands, scrabbling in the dust and heaving away the broken blocks.

They had brought a stretcher for the body we saw being dug up but a stretcher was not needed for fragments so they bundled them all up in a blanket and carried them away. Aid workers and human rights monitors have started to call this it Ground Zero. The television pictures do not convey the devastation. You have to come here to walk over the dust and rubble that were people’s homes, picking your way through the little pieces of their lives, the children’s school books and discarded clothing. You have to smell the stench of death that clings to certain corners. The piles of rubble tower high above your head and the work of removing the bodies is nerve-wracking and haunting.

The Israeli Army is supposed to be removing the bodies accompanied by the Red Cross but when the curfew was lifted for a few hours Thursday the Palestinians returned in their droves to look for their own dead. Despite the pullback of Israeli troops reported by witnesses from the refugee camp Thursday, Jenin is still closed to journalists and human rights monitors. We had to sneak in across fields trying to avoid being spotted by Israeli soldiers.

The Palestinians crawled into the wreckage of their homes Thursday ducking under the perilously hanging piles of broken concrete. Someone was distributing masks to those digging to ward off the stench and the disease.

Moving around here is still perilous for Palestinians. Two men were brought into the hospital after they were shot at as they drove into Jenin. Ali Abu Salim has gone to a nearby village to see his grandchildren. As he tried to come home Thursday Israeli soldiers fired on the car injuring the 65-year-old Abu Salim in the arm and the driver Yasin Khalil in the buttock. Abu Salim told us his son Mohammed was killed during the Israeli onslaught on Jenin refugee camp.

There were plenty of people here Friday who said their relatives were missing or dead. One woman told us she was looking for her two sons. It is possible they are among hundreds of young Palestinian men the Israeli Army has detained. Or they could be in the rubble. Another woman stopped us angrily outside the hospital. She was saying something had happened to her sister but would not explain what. "See what Sharon has done to us,’’ she said hysterically. "America is with Sharon, Britain is with Sharon.’’ Slowly the bodies are emerging. So far only 36 have been identified, said the director of the hospital, Dr. Mohammed Abu Ghali; four are women, one is a 13-year-old child. And the rumor persists that bodies have been removed. Israeli military sources have said it was the army’s original intention to take the bodies away and bury them in an "special cemetery’’ in the Jordan Valley. But now say that the plan was dropped. A large white truck was hanging around Jenin Thursday.

The Palestinians say it is a refrigerator truck. Dr. Abu Ghali says the Israel soldiers handed over five bodies to the hospital authorities for burial out of the back of the truck. The hospital staff are burying the bodies they have identified in a makeshift cemetery behind the hospital. The grave is marked out with white stones. It is only a temporary resting place he says. For now amid all the destruction there is nowhere else to put them. (The Independent)