The lunar landscape that was the Jenin refugee camp

A fortnight ago, before Israeli forces invaded, this was a crowded, bustling place. The narrow alleys between the cinderblock homes - spanning barely the width of outstretched arms - were packed with children.
Yesterday, the Hart al-Hawashin neighbourhood, the heart of the Jenin refugee camp, was a silent wasteland, permeated with the stench of rotting corpses and cordite. The evidence of lives interrupted was everywhere. Plates of food sat in refrigerators in houses sheared in half by Israeli bulldozers. Pages from children's exercise books fluttered in the breeze.

In a ruined house, the charred corpse of a gunman wearing the green bandana of Hamas lay where it fell, beside his ammunition belt. Electric cables snaked through the ruins.

Alleys leading off the square deepened the image of wanton destruction: entire sides of buildings gouged out, stripped out to the kitchen tiles like discarded dolls' houses. The scale is almost beyond imagination: a vast expanse of rubble and mangled iron rods, surrounded by the gaping carcasses of shattered homes.

Yesterday the first definitive accounts of the battle of Jenin began to emerge as journalists broke through the Israeli cordon and gained access to the heart of the refugee camp. Palestinians describe a systematic campaign of destruction, with the Israeli army ploughing through occupied homes to broaden the alleys of the camp and make them accessible to tanks and vehicles.