Watching from on high as Israeli guns keep firing

The grey smoke rose in a curtain over Yasser Arafat's headquarters, drifting high above two minarets and then smudging the skyline south of Ramallah.

"I guess he's blown himself up," an Israeli paratrooper said with contempt. "That guy is finished." We stood at the edge of the Jewish settlement just 400 yards from the first houses of the newly reoccupied Palestinian city – surrounded by Merkava tanks, Magah armoured vehicles and Jeeps and trucks and hundreds of reservists tugging blankets and mattresses and guns from the backs of lorries.

"It's only just beginning, you know that?" the paratrooper asked. "They are idiots down there. They should know their terrorism is over. We're never going back to the '67 borders. Anyway, they want Tel Aviv."

A clap of sound punched our ears, a shell exploding on the other side of the hill upon which Ramallah lies. I wandered closer to the city, through a garden of daffodils and dark purple flowers to where an Israeli boy soldier was standing.

"I want to go home," he said blankly. I said 20 seemed to be too young to be a soldier. "That's what my mother says."