Jenin Refugee Camp, West Bank On the edge of this shattered and gutted camp that was home to 13,000 people, Tamam Raja slumped onto a limestone boulder, bent her head and wept.

“We were 10 of us, and our neighbors, in our house,” she said. “My son-in-law was martyred and my son, I don’t know if he is in heaven or on the earth.”

Slowly, the stories of Israel’s war on the Jenin refugee camp are leaking out of the cordon of Israeli armor and infantry that has sealed off this town site of the fiercest battles in Israel’s two-week campaign against Palestinian cities and towns from the outside world.

Israel has designated the camp a closed military area, barring journalists and aid workers. The restrictions have triggered rumors of massacres and indiscriminate shelling and rocketing of residential neighborhoods, of death on a large scale.

The camp, a jumble of two- and three-story concrete-walled buildings pasted to a rocky hillside, has been pulverized by eight days of Israeli attacks, from tanks and armored fighting vehicles, helicopter gunships and armored bulldozers.

Israel defends the actions as an assault on “terrorist infrastructure” created by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. In the single deadliest recorded incident of the offensive, 13 Israeli soldiers were ambushed and killed earlier this week as they searched a building here.

Many buildings, from the edge of the camp into its devastated center, are pockmarked by machine guns, or punched through by tank shells. House upon house bear the scorch marks of fires that leapt out of control. Other buildings, their roofs ripped off by explosions, are little more than cartilaginous shells.

Citing safety reasons, the Israeli army has barred efforts by international aid organizations and the United Nations to enter the camp with food, water and medical supplies. Palestinians say the restrictions were designed to hide carnage committed by Israeli troops.

The Israeli army announced Friday that it would start burying the dead, which Israeli officials estimate at about 200 gunmen about double previous official estimates but which Palestinian leaders contend runs as high as 500, including women and children.

The army announcement triggered Palestinian allegations that Israel was trying to erase evidence of a “massacre.” No one has presented any such evidence, but because the army has barred all independent observers, including the Red Cross, the Red Crescent, the United Nations and foreign journalists, it is impossible to verify casualty figures or the true extent of the damage.

On Friday, for the second time, residents of the camp, were herded from their homes under the guns of the Israeli army. As they trudged from the town’s center, some residents settled on the edge of the camp here, worried about their relatives and wondering when they would be able to return to their homes to search for those lost in the eight days of war.

In interviews with many refugees who made it to the edge of the camp, a picture of unrelenting horror emerged. Israeli troops in the area were hostile and inaccessible, and detained errant reporters at gunpoint. Officials in Jerusalem offered only general denials of the Palestinian accounts of heavy civilian casualties.

“Everywhere in the camp people died,” said Mohammed Ali, 17. “We were lucky to survive.”

In black jeans and a dirty red and blue sweatshirt, Ali sat on a rock and surveyed the wreckage of his town. “Today they started kicking people out of their homes inside the camp,” he went on. “Army trucks came with loudspeakers saying: ‘If you do not leave your houses, we are going to bomb your houses,’ and ‘Don’t play with us. We are the strongest country in the world.'”