In Grim Cortege, Nine Arabs Carry Dead From Church
The procession, which began at the entrance to the compound built on the site where Jesus is believed to have been born, could hardly have been stranger: a slow-moving column of weary Muslim teenagers, led by robed Christian monks, carrying bodies in front of Israeli tanks and paratroopers. The clergymen and Palestinians wore white cloth masks over their noses and mouths, hoping to limit the smell of the decomposing bodies in their charge.

The column moved slowly forward through air filled with the growl of idling tank engines, and obscured by the billowing swirl of thick gray smoke from Israeli smoke grenades. It stopped at the edge of the Armenian monastery under orders from the soldiers, and the coffins were pried open with a hammer and chisel and searched, first by a Palestinian medical team and then by Israeli soldiers, to ensure they did not hold weapons, bombs or militants seeking to escape.

At last, nearly a half-hour after the bodies were brought out, they were loaded into a hospital van and taken away.

The exit of the youths and the bodies marked a small breakthrough in the negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis to end the siege in Manger Square, now in its fourth week. But it also provided a searing image for Palestinians, some of whom were enraged that their dead had to be evacuated at gunpoint, after weeks of being allowed to rot.
"I saw how they treat my people and what they think of my people when they let that happen toour bodies," said Shefah Saman, a Red Crescent volunteer, who later in the day asked visitors to look inside the coffins and examine the badly decomposed remains at the Beit Jala Hospital.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/26/international/middleeast/26BETH.html