Ramallah awakes to carnage

Doing the daily shopping - Ramallah-style

By the BBC's Barbara Plett Ramallah, the West Bank

At first the residents of Ramallah did not know whether to believe the news or not.

They approached journalists driving around the dangerous streets in armoured vehicles to ask if the curfew had really been lifted.

I needed to get out of the house, I just wanted to feel that I'm free

Ramallah resident

The silent city woke up as more and more people took the chance and ventured out.

Ramallah has been under siege for almost a week now, since the Israeli army invaded as part of "Operation Protective Wall" to crush what Israel says is the Palestinian terrorist infrastructure, a definition that includes the Palestinian Leader Yasser Arafat.

Soldiers cleaned up pockets of resistance from policemen and militia men, and destroyed the Preventive Security Headquarters, the nerve centre of the Palestinian security apparatus.

The fighting has died down now, but the occupation is complete.

People have been confined to their homes watching the mop-up operations from their windows.

So a few hours of reprieve was a godsend.

'Nothing left'

"I needed to get out of the house, I just wanted to feel that I'm free - to feel that I'm a normal citizen again," said one young woman shopping in a few hastily opened stores in the city centre.

Adil Badr was buying bananas for his family of five.

The martyrs come before anything else

Gravedigger Abu Ali

"Last night we had a piece of cheese and bread, that's all, and nothing left," he said.

"Today we didn't have breakfast or lunch."

At the Ramallah Hospital the priority was clear: people started digging a mass grave in the parking lot as fast as they could to bury the bodies piling up after five days of siege.

Gravedigger Abu Ali said he did not use the precious time to restock food supplies because "the martyrs come before anything else".

The "martyrs" will be put in a mass grave until they can have a proper burial

As they worked, several ambulances drove in with sirens blaring, making the most of the few hours of free movement before the tanks returned to block their path.

The Israelis say they need to check the vehicles for explosives, but that has virtually shut down the rescue services.

"For the first 48 hours [of the invasion] we operated every hour, most of the night of Thursday, Friday and Saturday," said Dr Fawzi Salamah, watching as the grave was padded with wooden slats and blankets.

"Then all of a sudden it stopped; there've been no ambulances for the last 48 hours - we've only operated on one injury in that time."

But the mortuary was not big enough to hold the dead after five days.

There were 27 bodies: six were collected by families, three were unidentified and 18 others were carried into the car park in white plastic bags smeared with blood.

Each was marked with an identification number and name, their families will give them a proper burial at home when they can.

Pent-up grief

Palestinians said many were policemen from other West Bank cities or the Gaza Strip, there were also university students and visitors stranded by the invasion.

One was a woman shot in the neck by a sniper on Tuesday morning just 50 metres from the hospital.

A small child hung onto her older sister as the bodies were laid out in rows for traditional Muslim burial prayers - both were sobbing.

The atmosphere was charged with grief: not only at death, but violent death, grief pent up for five days.

"Make way, make way," the men cried as they heaved the bodies onto their shoulders.

There had been no time to do anything but dig a grave, and they had to hurry with their mourning, curfew was about to begin again.