The joyful ringing of churchbells greeted us as we drove past the rose stone statue of Saint George slaying the dragon which guards the tiny central square of the West Bank town of Beit Jala. The bells were celebrating Beit Jala's deliverance from last week's 50-hour Israeli reoccupation.
We followed the tank tread marks along Virgin Mary Street to the Greek Orthodox Church of the Virgin and slipped into a white-painted pew. While the congregation assembled, three priests in red and gold vestments began to sing the service, accompanied by the strong voices of a male choir standing before the gilt iconostasis beneath the star-strewn vault.
The people came in tight little family groups, lit candles and placed them in brass stands filled with sand, and then took their places. Elderly women in lace mantillas, children in shining Sunday best, men informal in shirts and trousers, and girls in jeans and T-shirts. A tiny boy carried a slender candle more than twice his height. A woman across the aisle offered us each a piece of bread in welcome.
In this town of 12,000 souls, everyone knows everyone else. Well-meaning strangers are greeted as guests. By the time the lesson was read, the church had filled with people. The singing swelled to a grateful shout: "Thanks be to God."
My companions, members of the International Solidarity Movement, had come to Beit Jala last Tuesday morning in the first hours of Israel's reoccupation to confront tanks and deliver bread to families without food. So we visited some of the recipients to see how they are faring.
The house of Father George Shawan, one of the priests who said Mass, stands at the corner of Virgin Mary and Iraq streets where an Israeli tank had taken up position. Yesterday, an armed youth from Fatah's Tanzim grassroots movement was guarding the crossroad. The four-storey building is home to three generations of Shawans. The Israelis imprisoned 22 family members, 10 of them small children, for 12 hours from 1 a.m. on Tuesday in a tiny windowless room. "There was no milk for the babies. They never stopped crying. We had to ask to go to the toilet. We couldn't breathe," Ms Heidi Shawan said.
The Israelis established firing positions on the upper floors of the house, and smashed windows, and cupboards, The Shawans were allowed to move into the sitting room only after journalists shamed the soldiers.
This was the pattern in all reoccupied Beit Jala. At the Tahan residence down the hill, Antti, a bright 12 year old, frankly admitted he was terrified when the Israelis established themselves on the topmost stories of the unfinished house and opened up on Tanzim in the lower village. "I saw the soldiers carrying something long like rockets up to the roof," Antti said. "My father told us it was a telescope ... but there were many." His mother said the tubes were rocket launchers.
Antti spread out his collection of spent shells and bullet casings on the kitchen table for us to admire the quantity and variety of materiel he had collected upstairs.
Two boys appeared at the door with shells from a heavy machinegun they wanted to exchange for some of Antti's hardware. As soon as the Israelis pulled out on Thursday morning, children came to the door and asked to go collect bullets.
Brass casings, grenade pins and sharp bits of shrapnel are traded by Beit Jala's children as others collect marbles or computer games. Perhaps their mundane commerce dispels lingering trauma.