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- guardian.co.uk, Thursday April 4 2002 02.35 BST
The Israeli soldiers who came to their door on Monday had been shouting through the metal door for Samaya and Khalid to open up.
When they refused the soldiers fired 18 bullets through the door, cutting down Samaya and her son, who had collapsed and died in the gloomy ground floor room.
Khalid's brother Yousef, who showed us the bodies where they lay, took us through his house. He showed us where a missile from an Apache helicopter had blown a hole through the wall of his children's bedroom.
He showed us a "martyr" poster depicting a cousin who had died fighting for Hamas. In the children's bedroom was a poster showing dead "martyrs" of the al-Aqsa brigades. He said that his three children liked it.
He made no bones that his family had militant links. But was a militant cousin any reason to kill his brother and his mother?
Yousef blamed a collaborator killed recently by gunmen in the town for supplying his address to the Israeli soldiers.
Then Yousef took us next door to the little mosque that sits in his narrow, cobbled street. There he showed us the third body, of a man in middle age, his jacket pulled back from his paunch to show the bullet wound that killed him.
A paramedic who had tried to help had fitted a canula to his wrist. No ambulances have been allowed into this area for the last two days. So he bled to death.
I searched the floor for evidence that this man had fired at Israeli soldiers from inside the mosque. But there was no weapon, nor any spent rounds on the floor save those Israeli ones that the soldiers had fired on entering the tiny mosque.
Yesterday as a stand-off continued in the nearby Manger Square, site of the Church of the Nativity built on the reputed birthplace of Jesus, a few hundred metres from the Abdas' little house Israeli soldiers continued to move through the streets from door to door.
We came across two columns of them, retreating ahead of us in the direction of Manger Square, firing shots into the doors that they had already blasted from their hinges as they went.
On every corner and every block the soldiers had smashed the water pipes and mains, destroyed cars and ripped up electricity cables.
At one doorway a woman appeared, shaking with fear. "We have no food or water," she told us, crying. "The soldiers came into my house and stood us side by side. They destroyed our water tank."
At the Lutheran church a little way into the old quarter, the stone crucifix outside its gates had been smashed and shattered, hit by an advancing tank.
Elsewhere we found other remnants of the continuing fighting: an armoured panel, ripped from an armoured personnel carrier that had run into a wall. Elsewhere the drifts of spent shell casings from the Israeli soldiers' weapons.
We halted when the Israeli soldiers called to us to come no nearer to the square where some 200 Palestinian armed militants were holed up in one of Christianity's holiest sites, the Church of the Nativity. Contacted by phone, those trapped inside the church and other churches and buildings in the area of Manger Square described a terrifying stand-off.
Scores of gunmen, accompanied by municipal officials, clergy and a handful of largely local journalists, are trapped without electricity, food or water with the vast might of the Israeli defence forces at the door.
The Israeli army has said that shots have been fired from the church. Those inside the church, including the Palestinian governor of Bethlehem, Mohammed Madani, denied this was the case.
Mr Madani said he had been negotiating with the Israeli army to evacuate the wounded and bring in food. "Until now, all our attempts failed because the Israelis are not responding to anything," he said by phone from inside the church.
As Israeli soldiers encircled the church, the Palestinians rested in pews and on the stone floor, said Samir, a Palestinian policeman inside the church. Ten of the gunmen were wounded, including one who was in critical condition.
Among those trapped inside the church, the Vatican confirmed yesterday, are 40 Franciscan monks and nuns, as well as 30 Greek Orthodox and Armenian monks.
All day yesterday, out of sight, the Vatican representatives were involved in negotiations with the Israelis and those trapped inside for their safe surrender.
Frantic negotiations were under way to save the lives of the Palestinians and persuade them to lay down their arms. "If this doesn't happen," said a Vatican spokesman, "the place where Jesus was born will become the theatre and cradle of massacres and violence."
The reason that the gunmen inside the church are fearful of surrender was demonstrated in the early hours of yesterday as Israeli troops blasted the door of the Bethlehem municipality offices, just off Manger Square, storming the offices of the Palestinian media centre and arresting all those inside.
Israel's foreign ministry was in touch with the Vatican in an attempt to find a peaceful solution to the standoff at one of Christianity's holiest shrines, said Raanan Gissin, an adviser to Mr Sharon.
Mr Gissin said Israel was making every effort to resolve the situation without bloodshed but he blamed the Palestinians for violating the holy site's sanctity.
"Because of our military operation they return to their old practice of trying to use and abuse churches and holy sites in Bethlehem as a refuge and as a place from which they can conduct their attacks against our forces," he said.
