`Just as we think things can't get any worse, they do," declared Hanan Ashrawi as she spoke to us one morning last March. Her words have proved prophetic.

We were a group of church people from a variety of Christian traditions in these islands making a two-week visit to the Middle East in mid-March facilitated by the Middle East Council of Churches.

Some of us had spent a week in Lebanon and Syria and some in Egypt and we had all come to Jerusalem by way of Jordan. Everywhere we had been, from a small village in middle Egypt to a capital city such as Amman, the same questions were put to us: (a) Why does the international community allow the State of Israel to behave towards the Palestinians in a manner it was not prepared to tolerate, for example, from Iraq towards Kuwait? (b) Why does the world community not insist that Israel must honour the United Nations resolutions with regard to the Occupied Territories?

Why can Israel not see that its own security is more dependent on Palestinian freedom and dignity than on the force of its own arms?

Those who visited Gaza found conditions as dreadful as Michael Jansen outlined in her hard-hitting article in The Irish Times on May 4th. Those of us who went to Hebron, Bethlehem and Beit Jala were equally shocked by what we saw.

Travelling to Hebron along Road 60 was eye-opening. We passed a number of settlements, noting the swathes of arable land on either side of the road confiscated and cleared for security.

We heard of olive groves uprooted to make way for settlements, of settlements only semi-occupied as the owners of many of the apartments were living out of the country.

We had been told categorically by an adviser to the Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, that "the question of settlements is irrelevant" and that no new settlements would be established in the West Bank and Gaza. "Natural expansion", however, should be expected.

Looking at the settlements, we could see how they were being sited round Jerusalem, in what appears to be an effort to surround the city and to create yet more "facts on the ground", which will prove another hurdle for any peace process.

Accompanied by officers from the Temporary International Presence in Hebron (TIPH), we viewed a small city-centre settlement, for the security of which the wholesale fruit and vegetable market had been closed down as well as part of the retail market.

We stopped at the Ibrahimi Mosque in which 29 Muslim worshippers had been killed by a Jewish settler in 1994. (It was in the aftermath of this atrocity that TIPH came into being). We were taken to flashpoints familiar from television footage.

We saw overwhelming evidence of the total disruption of daily life in a Palestinian city, disruption in the interests of the security of a very small number of illegal settlers.

Near Bethlehem, we diffidently entered a home badly damaged by shelling from a point across the valley. The intervening trees had been trimmed to allow a better view of the "target" area. Children ran around through the broken glass and one little tot had some bullets in her hands.

As we stood in the corridor, to the right was normality, a regular untidy family bedroom, with photographs of a wedding, personal effects and so on; to the left, the blackened shell of what had been a sitting room.

In one room, we saw how bullets had gone through the closed door and become embedded in the wall of the corridor.

On the rooftop, the damage was even worse and a tank installed to catch precious rainwater had been riddled with bullets so it could no longer hold more than a few gallons.

We met groups of articulate and highly educated Palestinians, Christians, and Muslims, who challenged our Western attitudes to Israel/Palestine.

In a book-lined office we listened to one group speak of the constant humiliations to which they are subjected as Palestinians. "You are free to travel in my country, I am not," we were told.

Roadblocks, closures, the refusal of travel passes, all contribute to make daily life almost impossible for ordinary people who happen to be Palestinian. We heard horror stories of a child who died from a perforated appendix, of mothers forced to give birth in taxis, all refused permission to pass at checkpoints on their way to hospital.

Church leaders of all traditions pleaded with us to encourage pilgrims from the West to visit not only the holy sites but the living stones, those people who are our Christian sisters and brothers.

"Jerusalem is holy for three faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam," we were reminded, "and it is a capital city for two peoples."

Pray for the peace of Jerusalem . . . for God's sake.

Gillian Kingston is a member of the Methodist Church and lives in Dublin