Controversy Swirls Over Jenin Battle

JENIN REFUGEE CAMP, West Bank, April 12 -- As Israeli helicopters fired missiles on the jumble of cinder-block houses around her, Tamam Raja cowered in terror under a blanket, she said, listening to the anguished screams for help from neighbors as their homes collapsed on top of them.

When a sniper round tore through the window and hit her son-in-law in a room above her, she and other family members sobbed helplessly as he bled and pleaded, "Rescue me, rescue me." Fifteen minutes later, she recounted, new barrages from the U.S.-supplied gunships entombed him alive in the rubble. Soon she could no longer hear his cries.

The Israeli assault on Jenin refugee camp has been the most intense and sustained of the 15-day-old offensive against what Prime Minister Ariel Sharon calls a Palestinian terrorist infrastructure. Palestinian fighters here put up the fiercest resistance of the campaign; Palestinian officials have said hundreds of people were killed, some massacred. Their rage was further inflamed when the army announced today it would take away corpses of Palestinian gunmen slain here and bury them at a special cemetery -- an "enemy's cemetery," the army called it -- more than 25 miles to the southeast in the Jordan Valley.