An oil slick with broken glass scattered through it is not an appealing sight at the best of times but it acquires an extra dimension of nausea when you realise this marks the spot where a man breathed his last.
As usual in this part of the world there were disparate accounts of how Atef Ahmed al-Nabulsi (25) met his death as he drove by a back road near the West Bank city of Ramallah at about 7 a.m. yesterday.
An Israeli army spokeswoman said soldiers had opened fire when his car failed to stop at a roadblock close to the village of Rafat and that he ignored warning shots. Angry Palestinians at the scene claimed it was a set-up job: "They were waiting for somebody."
A third possibility was that he may have panicked, since local information was that checkpoints at this spot were unusual. With a dead driver at the wheel, the car reportedly went out of control - hence the oil slick and broken glass.
The dead man's 17-year-old cousin, who was a passenger in the car, was shot in the liver and had to undergo three hours of emergency surgery in Ramallah Hospital. I saw him afterwards, lying on the bed unconscious with breathing-tubes attached. He was deathly pale from loss of blood and shockingly young: medical personnel confirmed he was only 17 years old.
Outside in the hall there was a woman in her late 30s, her eyes red and raw from crying. This was the boy's mother, who was surrounded by other family members. Yahia, her son, was on his way to work as a baker's assistant when he was shot.
Luckily, the boy was expected to recover. The director-general of the hospital, who also performs surgery, Dr Hosni Atari, said 10 to 15 beds were kept vacant each day for emergency cases arising out of the Intifada.
Since the uprising began four months ago, between 800 and 900 patients had been admitted to the hospital suffering from gunshot wounds or other injuries. About half had undergone emergency operations, which were successful in all but 10 cases. A total of 36 boys and young men were dead on arrival. Dr Atari estimated that 30 to 40 per cent of the victims were aged between 10 and 20; 50 per cent between 20 and 25; and the rest over 25.
From his desk he produced a plastic container holding different types of bullets extracted from patients during surgery. The rubber bullet was considerably smaller than the one we know from Northern Ireland: a hard plastic-like cylinder surrounding a piece of metal, it was about the size of a castor from an armchair.
Dr Atari said if it penetrated the eye it could cause brain damage: "In 13 cases, patients have lost eyes." He displayed other projectiles: a sharp-nosed high-velocity bullet; a round metal ball in the low-velocity category.
There were various pieces of twisted metal that were hard to identify precisely. He said the percentage of patients who left the hospital with some form of disability was very high: damage to critical nerves could leave an arm or a leg paralysed.
How can young men and boys, usually with nothing more than slingshots, confront heavily armed troops and even tanks? Dr Atari responded that when you are defending your family and your homeland, "everything looks cheap, even your life".
I had come to Ramallah mainly to find out about the economic effects of what people here are calling "the situation" when the Grim Reaper tugged at my elbow. Arriving eventually at the Ministry of Economy and Trade, I discovered the telephone landlines had been cut off due to lack of funds to pay the bill. Staff were making do with mobiles and e-mail.
Imagine going to the Department of Finance in Dublin and finding the phones were out: it was a telling indication of how the economic crisis is starting to bite in the Palestinian territories.
A senior official at the Ministry, Dr Saeb Bamieh, explained that only loans from the European Union and Arab neighbours made it possible to pay civil service and police wages and salaries. The salary problem was dealt with month by month: January pay cheques had only just been issued, about two weeks late. Not a good start to the building of a Palestinian nation-state.
At a more basic economic level, there is a serious problem arising from the fact that most of the 130,000 Palestinians - Dr Bamieh's figure - who commute to Israel each day for work are now unable to get past military checkpoints. He added that the West Bank and Gaza had effectively been divided into 54 "cantons" and it was very difficult to get from one place to another even within the territories.
This meant the internal economy of the Palestinians was virtually paralysed. Worse again, exports and imports were at a standstill with consequent loss of revenue to the Palestinian National Authority.
I encountered living illustrations of the parlous economic situation in the Al Ama'ri refugee camp on the outskirts of Ramallah. Half a dozen able-bodied men were sitting around, trying to figure out how to keep their families afloat.
Khaled said he worked in a dairy products factory in Israel but had been unable to get past the checkpoints where people were being stopped on security grounds since early October. He had seven children from four months to 15 years.
Mustafa is a taxi-driver who cannot drive outside the city. Aged 43, he has 12 children from the infant stage to 25 years. He is eking out an existence by taking local people around at about 50p a time.
Palestinians have lost their money and their freedom of movement but have not lost their pride. Having gone into detail about the hardship she and her family were enduring, a woman in a vegetable shop had this parting message: "Even if the blood is up to our knees, we won't be driven out of Palestine."