Bulldozers level the carnage left behind by US-supplied Apache gunships in Jenin. Constant images of women and children trapped in basements and grisly corpses flash across the television screens of a dazed and angered Arab public.

The living rooms of poor and middle class Arabs, whose young men provide Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda with many of its fresh militant recruits, are full of such pictures these days – the very images that feed the sense of despair that Western experts on conflict and terror contend helps hard-core terror organizations recruit new members.

The media barrage – through television, radio, and newspapers – is ceaseless. Though details of the fighting remain cloudy, pending formal investigation, the message to Arabs seems clear: Almost without exception – among the rich, the poor, the young, and the old in this teaming city of 26 million – people say the world, particularly Washington, has given the green light to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's army to run amok in West Bank cities, shattering lives.

An editorial this week in the "Arab News," a moderate Saudi newspaper, suggested that Jenin conjures up the "the name Srebrenica" and "all the worst hor- rors of the Bosnian war; in 1995, when 8,000 Muslim men and boys were massacred by Serbs. In the same way, the name Jenin looks set to go down in history as the place that encapsulates all the horror of the present phase of the long war for Palestinian freedom."

Stanley Bedlington, a counterterrorism expert, who received his own training in the British Army in Jenin between 1946 and 1948, says the fresh images on Arab television screens are likely already feeding the recruitment drives of Al Qaeda and other terror organizations. "These are the kind of images that these groups can point to when they are signing up new members," says Mr. Bedlington. "We know that even since Sept. 11, terror groups are gaining a stronger foothold in certain areas, and we've seen new Al Qaeda squads opening up as well."

The sense of humiliation created by these images of carnage and suffering are the real danger, other experts say.

"Most of the analysis we have to date suggests that these images foment a sense of anger and impotence, which can be used as forms of motivation by terror groups like Al Qaeda, which promote the idea of suicide bombing," says Herb Kelman, the director of a program for international conflict analysis and resolution at Harvard University. "One has to assume that what is happening now is feeding these very psychological impulses – a sense of helplessness and humiliation."

And in what many experts say is an attempt by Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network to remain centerstage, Al Jazeera yesterday broadcast snippets of Mr. bin Laden alongside his No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Another portion of the tape allegedly shows one of the Sept. 11 hijackers reciting his "will."

Interviews with people in the scorching-hot streets of Cairo suggest a new anger boiling beneath the surface. If there is one archetypal image drawn from the latest round of fighting in the Middle East by the Arab masses, it is that of one of the world's most efficient militaries, the Israeli army, rampaging through the refugee camp at Jenin. Though it's not yet clear what happened when the Israeli army lost 23 fighters and leveled much of the camp, Jenin has already become symbolic of the Arab world's fears that no one really cares, Egyptian analysts say.

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