Jenin, 2

We left the camp at about four in Ashraf's cab, our first port of call an old church in one of the neighbouring villages. This church is famous for being the site where Jesus cured ten lepers, although (if I remember correctly) he enacted this miracle from an unusually cautious distance, the men in question having been shut up in a cave (which now forms part of the church and is one of its main attractions), food delivered via an overhead chute. It was pleasant to sit and think there for a while, but the church was not as striking as you might expect, considering its age and religious importance. Call me pedantic, but a church shouldn't need an air-conditioning unit; the coolness should be inherent to it, and such a device would be superfluous in many of the older Arab homes with their canny use of thick walls and other features to create a haven from the sun. We were shown round by a thin, ascetic-looking man who turned up with the church key and - as has been so often the case - accompanied for the duration by a group of children who had spotted us entering town and wanted some of the action. We took lots of silly pictures and played 'thumb war', which has been a total winner in Palestine and a good way past language deficiencies.

Next we drove with Ashraf to a vantage point high above Jenin for a good view of the city and the startlingly flat landscapes which spread outwards towards distant Nazereth, on the other side of the Green Line (the internationally recognised border of Israel established in 1948, but only followed in part by the separation wall). Ashraf directed our gaze to yet more settlements on the neighbouring hilltops, and pointed out the ruins of the Mukata, the Palestinian Authority offices dynamited wholesale by the Israelis during the Second Intifada. We stopped off for a closer look on our way onwards, clambering onto the concrete rubble to examine the remaining parts of the building's structure, wires spilling out of the collapsed floors and lumps of concrete clinging forlornly to cables connecting nothing with nothing.

At the Freedom Theatre, our final rendezvous point, we learned about the pioneering and brave work of the Jewish-Israeli woman who started doing acting workshops with traumatised children in the latter part of her life and settled in the camp, her son now continuing her legacy. We also saw panicky bullet-holes sprayed across the facade of the building adjoining the theatre, and Ashraf related to us how he heard young soldiers crying in their tanks during the siege of Jenin, saying "bullshit Sharon, why'd he send us here?". He also told us the story of the boy in whose name the neighbouring computer centre had been opened. This boy had been killed on Eid at the end of Ramadam by an Israeli sniper who'd spotted him playing with a plastic gun his father had bought him. He was twelve years old. Taken immediately to an Israeli hospital, it was not possible to prevent his death, but, in an extraordinary gesture of compassion, his father permitted his son's organs to be donated to two Jewish children requiring emergency treatment and their lives were duly saved. The father of one of these children offered the Palestinian father money, which - unsurprisingly - he turned down, but he did consent to the Israeli funding a centre in Jenin commemorating his son and this is what happened.