I witnessed the achievements of this war at the corner of St. Paul VI Street and the market. There, among the ruins, were the "tremendous achievements" of Ariel Sharon, the "work that isn't yet complete" of Benjamin Ben-Eliezer and "the operation that is proceeding according to plan" of Shaul Mofaz, the three commanders-in-chief of this accursed war, the "war for our home."

Water leaps out of a burst pipe and gurgled down the slope of the market alley, spreading in all directions, under the skeletons of the many cars that had been shot and smashed and crushed and perforated and blown up and burned and now stood mute, monuments to the steamroller operation. It seeps into the piles of garbage and scraps of food, from which a terrible stench rises, while a well-groomed elderly woman makes her way into the street holding two empty bottles of Johnny Walker (Red Label). She has been without water in her home for a week. Every few hours, when the water in her two bottles runs out, she goes down into the street - at her age all fear of curfew or soldiers is apparently long past - holds her bottles under the faucet, fills them to whatever level she likes, and returns home. No one but her and the reddish cat that darts across the deserted street - the infrastructure of terrorism.

I have been in streets under curfew before, but never have I encountered a silence like this. No human sound crosses the threshold of the houses, not the crying of an infant on the other side of the iron gates, not the groaning of an old man behind the shuttered windows, not the sound of a radio from the second floor, not the noise of the neighbors' television set, not the echo of footsteps. Nothing. The silence of the grave. Ghost streets. Not even one curious face peeps out from behind the barred windows.

Yet there is life here: thousands of families, with their children and elderly, are imprisoned in these houses. It is inconceivable that they all fled and a whole city was abandoned overnight. So where are they, the people who live on St. Paul VI Street in Bethlehem, not far from the Church of the Nativity? Is the fear of the soldiers and the tanks so overwhelming that the people are pretending to be dead?

* * *

Bethlehem, birthplace of David and of Jesus, is now the city of death and destruction. Here is a one-room flat in which the members of a bereaved family were forced to remain, locked up with their children for a day and a half with the bodies of two of their loved ones, the mother and the brother. They were killed in the shooting and could not be removed, according to reports around the world, by order of the Israel Defense Forces. A few stores stand wide open, their merchandise scattered. In other open stores, goods remain laid out neatly on the shelves, as though nothing had happened and they weren't broken into, their owners didn't flee and their clients haven't been imprisoned in their homes for a second week.

On the door of Nadr Hijazin's pharmacy is the druggist's home phone number, in nearby Beit Sahur, in case of an emergency. But no one phoned, no one came, and perhaps this is not the kind of emergency the druggist had in mind. And even if it is, what will Hijazin do about it, since he is imprisoned at home, too?

Entering the wide-open door, we invade his privacy for a moment - a pharmacy broken into by our forces - and enter on tiptoe a place where we should not be. It's a strange, uneasy feeling. The smell of a drugstore is in the air, a mix of various scents, medicines the druggist prepared, perfumes, soaps and cosmetics. All the shelves and cupboards in the old pharmacy are made of wood. Only the package of diapers on the floor and the acoustic ceiling that has been ripped out of its frame indicate that the IDF was "fighting for our home" here too.

There is wide destruction in the street - even more wrenching in the light of the development and renovations carried our here in recent years, before hope was blasted, and now evoked only by a few international signboards. While we wandered through the narrow streets of Bethlehem, Israelis and Palestinians were fighting north of the city, in the Nablus Casbah and the Jenin refugee camp, and the scale of the killing and devastation there dwarf what we see in Bethlehem. But here, too, in this small horror, in the place where pilgrims and tourists walked just a short time ago, the sights are hard to take. An imprisoned, frozen, silent city.

Here is the Shepherd Hotel, which used to offer dinner with an orchestra, and for Israelis too, now bolted shut, like the other hotels in the city. Only the Star Hotel is enjoying a revival; this is where the foreign correspondents stay, because it's close to the fighting. Every war-torn city has a hotel like that.

Every war-torn city also has war taxis, and here is the station of quasi-taxis on the outskirts of Beit Jala. A curfew trip from the entrance to the city to the hospital, on the edge of Bethlehem, a two-minute trip at high speed, costs NIS 100 each way. A few Beit Jala residents, the brave or perhaps the desperate, stuck the letters "TV" on their battered cars, filled up with gas during the last break in the curfew on Friday, and became instant cabbies. The manager in the makeshift station, which is perched on a pile of earth, watched the army's movements and kept strict order in the line. Beit Jala hasn't known prosperity like this for a long time. Never has there been a view like this from Bethlehem; you have to see it to believe it.

* * *

White cloths with red Stars of David emblazoned on them are attached to the fronts of two armored personnel carriers that cross the city square one after the other; the reservists who grip the machine guns look like bank tellers. A photograph of the decorated APCs will adorn the next day's papers around the world - perhaps because there is nothing better, perhaps because of the juxtaposition of armored vehicle and Star of David. The junction, once the busiest in the city, is deserted. The electronic information board in the center of the junction is not working, nor are the traffic lights, some of which have been maliciously demolished. Nor is there any traffic.

The IDF's third incursion into Bethlehem is also the most destructive. All the elements of the terrorist infrastructure have been well and truly destroyed: the new blue public phone booths, one of the first signs of the Palestinian Authority's move into the city, are smashed; the windows of the many dental clinics are shattered; Chic Parisienne, a store that sells cosmetics and women's lingerie, is charred; and St. Mary, who stands atop the Holy Family maternity hospital, was wounded by shrapnel, and the star, signifying last Christmas, has slipped out of her hand.

This elegant hospital is closed. The women of Bethlehem give birth in their homes, sometimes with the help of a midwife over the phone, as in the rest of the West Bank these days. It's a do-it-yourself thing; three newborn infants are reported to have died because of it in Ramallah. In the hospital are a few infants who were born prematurely into the war. The flag of the order that runs this hospital, which we visited in the previous occupation after fragments of shells slammed into the premature infants ward, continues to fly as though nothing has changed.

The sounds of gunfire grow louder, burst after burst, one more very long burst, and then silence again. Photographs of the local shaheeds - martyrs for the cause - are pasted on the iron doors of the closed shops. Mohammed Abu Samour, who was killed in the first invasion; Fadi Za'ariri, who was killed in the second; Suleiman Dibas and Ibrahim Araj, who were killed a month ago in the nearby Ayida refugee camp. The first martyrs had color posters, but Dibas and Araj appear in black and white on plain paper, and the martyrs of the present invasion will probably not have memorial posters at all. How many will we need - 150 in Jenin? A thousand in the West Bank?

Roaming dogs bark in the distance, the wind slashes everything unmercifully and lifts refuse and dust into the air. Curtains on the broken windows in a dental clinic flap violently in the strong wind. This is the street of the dentists, where many Israelis went in the past. Dr. Aiman Adal, Dr. Spiro Tamas, Dr. Muhanid Tarfi, Dr. Mazen Samra - now just signs. A perforated gas canister rolls around. The sign of the Al Lim Library is a reminder of the kind of life that used to be conducted here.

On foot up the empty street. Parking for tourist buses only. The street gradually narrows until it becomes an alley. This is the start of the descent to the Church of the Nativity. An alarm wails from inside Chic Parisienne, wails and wails, all for nothing. Who knows how long it's been wailing? Another burst water pipe, which someone has tried to block with a broom handle, is spewing water into the street. Madabasa Square, a fine stone square, is smashed. Destruction, too, at the entrance to the Lutheran Evangelical Church, which the Finnish government has just finished renovating. The street is littered with broken glass. The whole Abada family has the audacity to stick its nose into the street: mother, father and five small children are on a morning stroll to the courtyard. Two people were killed next to their house, they say. A French correspondent asks if they have already obtained bread, because yesterday he passed by here and they asked him to find bread for them.

They have enough until tomorrow, says the father of the family, who runs a sports center. His car, now a hulking ruin, is parked next to his house. The residents had to work very hard to buy their cars, all of which - all - have now been savaged. Some of the cars were used by those who fled into the Church of the Nativity, and the signs of the chase are apparent on the remains of the vehicles. Stuck into walls or fences, riddled with holes like a sieve, windows shattered, seats and accessories ripped out, a few stains of clotted blood. Some of the cars were blown up or bombed, like those at the corner of St. Paul VI Street and Sawajara. Others were simply parked in the wrong place. Only one car has remained intact, the brown Opel that was concealed behind the iron gate of the entry to the Evangelical Church. Its day may yet come, though.

Laundry ripped from a line is strewn between the skeletons of the cars. On the back seat of a brown Isuzu van, a vehicle of the Preventive Security forces, judging by its red license plate, is a can of Sano air freshener.

* * *

"Na...Nach...Nachman from Uman," soldiers have smeared the mantra of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav in black on the whitewashed wall at the entrance to the second floor of a residential building in one of the alleys; the paint is very fresh. The war against terrorism. The street below is littered with bullet casings. We are approaching the Church of the Nativity, which has become the church of the sanctuary. Again the silence of the grave, broken only by the gurgling of water flowing out of the smashed pipes.

A girl hurries by, dragging a garbage bag, and disappears immediately behind the door of her house. A group of soldiers is moving up the alley. Sticking close to the walls, they look around and point their rifles wildly in every direction, mainly at the rooftops. "Gunfire, gunfire," one of them shouts, practicing the English he learned in action flicks in order to warn the group of foreign correspondents in the alley.

"Dey ar shuting, liv de place."

"When will you leave?"

"No comment," the soldier says.

One of the soldiers is holding a canister of black spray; maybe he's the one who scrawled the graffiti about Rabbi Nachman on the wall of the house next to the church. "Explosive devices," says the writing on another wall, at the corner of the market street. The soldiers say that the wrecks of the cars may be booby-trapped:

"Dey are bombes."

"There are no signs that the Israeli army is about to evacuate the city any time soon," a German correspondent reports in her language, doing a stand-up with the Church of the Nativity in the background.

"We're going to get screwed because of them," the soldier mutters to his buddy. "Yaniv Y." is the name on the helmet of one of the troops. Bassam Hamis, 23, who lives on the street, emerges for a moment from his house to relate that he was detained for about 10 hours, beaten and bound, and then used as a live shield by soldiers in the alley. Seeing the approaching soldiers, he vanishes.

The bell tower stands mute above the silver-gray dome, as in the postcards they used to sell to tourists here. Nothing attests to the drama going on inside, apart from the soldiers' warnings about gunfire. Towering beyond the windows of a burned-out clothing store are the cranes that are rapidly building the new neighborhood of Har Homa, which is another element in the wall around Bethlehem. "X. Clean," someone wrote on the entrance to the Lutheran Church, a sign of the successful search conducted by the soldiers. Che Guevara in red on the wall opposite. The gilded clock on the church tower in the square has stopped at 7:30.

A Red Cross supply convoy enters the city, looking like the convoys in Afghanistan or Kosovo, a reminder that there is a war going on here. The muezzin's recorded voice calls the faithful to prayer, but no one comes, of course. A little later, the telephone will ring and the horrific, piercing cries of relatives in the Jenin refugee camp will overshadow everything.

_____________

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