THE MIDDLE EAST: As the gunfire in Jenin refugee camp finally died down over the weekend, the public relations battle has gathered force.
On Saturday, the Israeli army finally allowed the first Israeli reporters into the camp, and a Reuters news agency team also ventured inside, and yesterday the army took an Israeli television crew into some areas - after more than a week in which the camp had been declared a closed military zone.
The footage and the testimony from these brief initial surveys confirmed earlier talk of widespread devastation in the camp, which was home to at least 13,000 Palestinians, and where the heaviest fighting of Israel's ongoing "Operation Defensive Wall" military offensive in the West Bank has taken place.
Buildings in an entire central area of the camp had been destroyed by the army's armoured bulldozers, and most buildings still standing appeared to have been abandoned, reporters said. A doctor at the hospital in the nearby town of Jenin, Dr Mahmoud Abu Salayeh, was quoted as saying that those who remained had been reduced to "drinking untreated water found in gullies in the streets." Israeli Channel 2 reporter Ronnie Daniel said that, during his "brief" tour of the camp yesterday - during which he filmed wrecked building after wrecked building bearing posters glorifying the memory of suicide-bombers who had emerged from the camp - he did not see a single body. But the Reuters reporters on Saturday saw several decaying bodies - including that of a middle-aged man next to a bookcase in his home, and those of four men in a living room that appeared to have been hit by a missile.
They quoted Andeera Harb, a child psychologist whose family owned the house, saying that the four had been eating dinner when the missile hit, but reported that one of the men wore a helmet, and that there appeared to be petrol bombs hidden near the front door.
The Israeli reporters said the army had assured them that "very few" civilians had been killed, and spoke of "two women and a child" among the dead; the director of the local hospital claimed he had received eight bodies of women and children.
On Friday, the Palestinian negotiator, Mr Saeb Erekat, had charged that 500 Palestinians were killed in the camp. The Israeli army's chief spokesman, Mr Ron Kitrey, said that morning the number was 300, but then issued a "clarification", insisting he had meant 300 dead or wounded. The army counted 23 soldiers killed there. Yesterday, the Israeli Defence Minister, Mr Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, told his cabinet colleagues that the Palestinian death toll was no higher than 70. By last night, the army had revised it down still further, to 45 - saying that 37 had been located - and spokesman Kitrey was apparently being carpeted for having cited higher numbers. Yesterday, in their meeting with Mr Colin Powell, the Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat and his colleagues repeated the massacre allegation. Israeli army commanders in the Jenin area insisted that this was false. "Not even close," said Col Dan Shwatkopf, to the Israeli TV crew. "There was fierce fighting. They [Palestinian gunmen] stood up to us. They booby-trapped buildings. They used some civilians as human shields." Israeli Arab Knesset members have alleged, by contrast, that the army used Palestinian civilians as human shields. Israel's Supreme Court yesterday rejected petitions that sought to bar the army from removing bodies from the camp, but the army and the petitioners reached an agreement that no bodies will be buried in unmarked graves at a "terrorists' cemetery" in the Jordan valley, as had been the army's intention.
Some bodies had been removed by the army last Thursday for such a burial, but that was halted by an earlier court injunction.