The Israeli army pulled out of Jenin yesterday as Palestinian residents of the town's devastated refugee camp dug for corpses and international aid workers moved in to help the homeless and trace the missing.
An Israeli armored unit also withdrew from Qalqilya, another West Bank town, after an overnight raid, witnesses said. Troops had left Qalqilya on April 9 but swept back in to search for suspected militants.
Israel's defense minister had said troops would quit Jenin and Nablus by tomorrow but stay at the Ramallah compound of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and near the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem until standoffs with militants ended.
US President George W. Bush said on Thursday that Israel had "met its timetable" on withdrawing from West Bank cities reoccupied three weeks ago in an offensive unleashed after Palestinian suicide bombers killed scores of Israelis.
An army statement said Israeli forces had "completed their mission in Jenin" and redeployed to positions encircling the city and its downtown camp "to prevent and thwart terrorist activity and the passage of terrorists into Israel."
As refugees rooted in the rubble of the camp for loved ones and possessions, humanitarian agencies were gaining a foothold to assess the extent of death, destruction and displacement.
They had criticized Israel for denying them access to the "closed military zone" for days after fighting abated.
The Swiss-based International Committee of the Red Cross set up a tracing service for missing people. It was also delivering water to the camp, where many mains and sewage pipes are broken.
The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) was distributing food.
UNWRA said an estimated 450 houses in the camp were demolished or uninhabitable. The average size of a Palestinian family is seven members and the camp had about 13,000 residents before the army swept in two weeks ago.
Uncollected bodies posed a disease risk, the ICRC said.
Mohammad Abu Ghali, director of the government hospital, said the confirmed body count had risen to 39 after the discovery of three more, identified by locals as Palestinian security men.
Ghali said on Thursday the final toll could climb to as many as 400 once all corpses had been extracted from the rubble. The Israelis say about 70 Palestinians died, almost all of them militants who had refused appeals to surrender. Twenty-three Israeli soldiers were killed.
Many of the Palestinian bodies recovered so far have been buried temporarily in the hospital garden .
Camp residents reported finding more body parts and they sprayed perfume as they went along to contain the stench.
The camp's Ansar mosque was perforated with bullet holes. Half a dozen mineral water bottles brimming with urine had been left on a stairway leading to the roof.
Palestinians living nearby said soldiers took over the mosque during the offensive. They pointed to boxes, bearing Hebrew script, which appeared to have held ammunition.
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