A night among the refugees

At dusk, the Israelis finally rev their engine one last time, fire a few parting shots and drive off. Anybody who doesn't spend the night at the center hastens home. The electricity is still off over the weekend, and there's not a speck of light to be seen in the entire town, apart from the eerie flashing red glow of some emergency vehicles. My colleague emerges from the garage where he's been hiding for almost two hours. Addas, the little boy who was with him, wet his pants from fear when an APC parked particularly close by.

As night falls, a group of men say their prayers in a hallway on one of the upper floors and volunteers start cooking simple meals for the whole building on two gas burners in an improvised kitchen. The food is relatively plentiful. There are some potatoes, eggplants, hummus, pita bread, olives and cans of tuna. Many people are too exhausted to wait for the meal and just curl up on their blanket wherever they can find a spot in one of the hallways. Many rooms are filled to capacity, some 25 people, often from the same family, sleeping close together. The corridors and some rooms are faintly lit by shimmering candlelight.

A family of some 30 people, all women and children, has bedded down in the central hall. "We are alive, thanks to God, but we lost everything and we are very worried about our men," says Intissar Abu Johar, who escaped from the refugee camp on Thursday. Despite the difficult circumstances in the center, it is a huge improvement over how the family spent the previous days.

"When we walked out of the camp we were stopped by a group of soldiers near the old government building in town. We all had to spend the night out there in the open," tells Abu Johar. She thinks the family's house in the camp may still be standing but it was completely ransacked. "The soldiers came in on the second day of the fighting and forced all of us into one room while they took over the house. They came with dogs and we heard them move around. When we left we saw that they had used the sofas as a bed for the dogs."

In one of the rooms, an 8-year-old boy shouts with a show of bravado: "I don't want to stay here, I want to go home." Home is dangerous; that is why they had to leave, his mother tells him. "I am not afraid, I will fight the Jews." The adults laugh, telling him to first get some sleep and grow strong.

Sunday morning, the army has a surprise: The curfew is being lifted for a couple of hours to allow people to do some shopping and stock up on food. But the streets are still deserted an hour after the announcement, because no one has been notified in advance and most people do not have access to radio or TV because the power was cut. Slowly the town comes to life as people gingerly lean out their windows and ask passersby if the curfew has really been lifted.

The center of town bears the scars of some heavy fighting, the roads and pavements churned up by tank tracks, cars and dumpsters flattened, windows shattered and walls penetrated by heavy-caliber machine gun bullets. Several buildings have been reduced to rubble. "Over there, that was a pharmacy," somebody points to a collapsed building on the edge of the old town, "and that was a bakery, for pita bread."

Next Page: For the Israeli army, a fear of civilians

• View blog reactions