The guns are silent but cries for help go unheard

It was late afternoon and not another soul could be seen in the utter desolation at the heart of the Jenin refugee camp - just the smell of death and a mundane jumble of clothing and household stuff that fluttered in a tangle of steel that used to reinforce the homes in which thousands lived.

Suddenly the silence was broken by a voice from just over a crest in the rubble. It was a US reporter, not quite able to believe his own eyes as he briefed his foreign desk by mobile telephone.

"It's just like Hiroshima," he said of the frenzied destruction thought to have been wreaked in the last two days of the Israelis' assault on a camp that was home to 15,000 people and to some of the strongest resistance to Israel's control of the West Bank and Gaza.

Putting aside politics and war, and the propaganda brawl over how many died in the fighting, this is a disaster zone without an adequate response.

The guns have been silent for five days, but desperate voices are still trying to kick-start an emergency operation - heavy-lifting machines, food, water and medicine - that some of the agencies involved said was being made difficult and painfully slow by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF).


In the Israeli Supreme Court, human rights groups sought an order that would make the IDF hand over bodies that are rotting in the rubble after arguing that the IDF were hindering the search and had reneged on a promise to provide rescue teams and the right digging equipment for the job.