MIDDLE EAST: The rumours raged all day: Numerous Israeli soldiers had been killed in the Jenin refugeecamp. Israeli assault helicopters were pounding Palestinian homes there. Bodies of dead Palestinians were lying in the streets. Suicide bombers were running at soldiers and detonating themselves.
And absurdly - and inaccurately - that the Israeli army's deputy chief of staff, perhaps the minister of defence as well, had been captured by gunmen from Islamic Jihad.
There was no independent confirmation or refutation of any of this because Jenin - an Islamic Jihad and Hamas stronghold, from which a series of suicide-bombers have been dispatched to attacks in Israel over recent months - had been declared a "closed military zone" by the Israeli army over recent days, as the worst fighting of its West Bank offensive flared there.
But as night fell on Day 12 of Israel's self-declared assault on the Palestinian "terror infrastructure", it was becoming possible to try and separate the facts from the invention: thirteen Israeli soldiers had been killed in the eastern area of the camp, and several dozen gunmen there were steadfastly refusing to surrender, vowing to fight to the death.
Accounts of Palestinian casualty tolls varied widely, but sources on both sides spoke of at least 100 Palestinians killed, possibly twice that many over recent days. Palestinian eyewitness said that helicopters had been firing into the area all day.
One Palestinian man - arrested by Israel in Jenin three days ago, and freed in a nearby village - said he had spoken to his family and learned that his mother and one sibling had been hit by such fire and bled to death.
The Israeli army's local commander, Gen Yitzhak Eitan, denied any of this.
Gen Eitan said the gunmen being pursued were "responsible for many blasts that have killed dozens of Israelis" and were "using their own civilians as human shields to fight us".
He was adamant that calling up air power in the crowded refugee camp would cause "heavy loss of life" among civilians and therefore was not being considered.
The 13 dead soldiers - by far the heaviest Israeli losses in the 12 days of fighting - were all reservists, only recently called to arms.
Earlier reports had suggested that they died when entering one of many buildings in the camp that had been booby-trapped.
A Hamas official had telephoned from the camp to claim that they had been killed by their own colleagues' fire.
Other Israeli sources said they had been in a courtyard of building when they came under fire, and that several of the dead men were buried under rubble as explosives in surrounding buildings were detonated.
Gen Eitan said only that, "A group of soldiers were hit by a number of explosive devices, one of the suicide-bombers apparently blew himself up, and they were then fired on."
The fighting was still continuing last night, with the Israeli army acknowledging that it was not allowing ambulances into the camp, and would do so only when the gunmen surrendered.
"The battle is moving from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, and we are using machinegun fire, explosives, grenades," said a local Hamas official, Abu al-Kheija, speaking by telephone from the camp.
"We are surprising the occupying forces as they enter buildings," he added.
Both sides described the warfare as the fiercest of the past 12 days, the "hard core" of the Intifada facing off against the army, each side vowing to prevail.
Mr Shimon Peres, the Israeli Foreign Minister, issued a bizarre statement worrying that "Palestinian propaganda is liable to accuse Israel that a 'massacre' took place in Jenin rather than a pitched battle against heavily armed terrorists."
In immediate response, the Palestinian Information Minister, Mr Yasser Abed Rabbo, accused Mr Peres of "trying to present the victim as a savage, and to present the murderer and the criminal as a human being."