Palestinians begin burying Jenin dead

Hana Abu Jandal pushed through the crowd until she reached a mound of bright orange dirt in the hospital’s back yard.

Her face creased into a scream: ‘‘Where is he? How could you bury him? I want to see him! I want to see him!’’

Her anger quickly turned to hysteria as she fell to her knees beside the temporary grave of her husband and others killed during the Israeli offensive in the Jenin refugee camp.

In a battle that ended on April 11, Israeli soldiers fought Palestinians armed with rifles and bombs.

The Israeli army said that 23 soldiers were killed and that most of the Palestinian casualties - they estimate in the dozens - were gunmen. The camp is known as a hotbed of militant activity.

Palestinians said civilians were massacred, a charge the army vehemently denied.

Camp residents were first able to come to the nearby hospital yesterday to look for relatives, after Israeli military vehicles that had surrounded the building withdrew.

During the Israeli occupation of the camp, the hospital grounds had been turned into a temporary graveyard, with medics placing 23 bodies, already decaying, into makeshift graves. Palestinians buried another five around the camp.

Israel said it entered the camp of 14,000 people to capture militants blamed for deadly attacks on Israelis. Military officials said gunmen booby-trapped buildings and streets in the camps in what turned out to be the deadliest battle of the three-week offensive.

Bodies were still turning up. Yesterday, medical workers removed the charred body of an old woman from the top floor of a building overlooking the centre of the camp. At one point the corpse slipped onto the road from the blanket workers had wrapped around it. Children watching nearby began to scream.

Residents with shovels picked through the middle of the camp, which looked like an earthquake zone.

Palestinian workers brought in two bulldozers to begin sifting through the wreckage.

People crowded around as one bulldozer edged into the side of a hill, tearing at large slabs of rock and aluminium roofing. Whispers began that as many as a dozen people had sought refuge inside a cave and that Israeli bulldozers had toppled a house over the entrance while clearing the area, trapping everyone inside.

It was not immediately clear if anyone was buried in the rubble.

While the bulldozer bit at the dirt, a woman ran screaming to block its path. ‘‘You are putting more earth on top of my brother!’’ she screamed, pointing to where the bulldozer had piled the debris it had taken from the hill.

Israel said soldiers had called over megaphones for residents to leave their homes before troops began demolishing buildings that were believed to be hideouts for militants.

Chopped-up human remains lay along the side of one alleyway. Flies and worms crawled over the mangled flesh before Palestinian Red Crescent workers placed the pieces into a white plastic bag and loaded them onto a trailer.

Elsewhere in the camp, a youth carried a pair of black jeans tied in a bundle. For journalists, he unwrapped it to reveal a child’s foot, burnt black.

At the hospital, Palestinians walked through to the back parking lot to see where their relatives were buried. Some held their hands in prayer before the stone tiles marking the perimeter of the burial plots. Others stumbled away in tears, supported by their friends.

‘‘He is with God now. It is all right, don’t cry,’’ said one woman, shaking Hana Abu Jandal by the shoulders. Abu Jandal kept her head on the ground, crying. ‘‘I want to see him,’’ she wept.