AL QUDS: In his three decades covering wars in the Mideast, television producer Charles Enderlin has had his run-ins with Israeli soldiers - but never a nasty rebuff like the one he got last week.

Trying to reach Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat’s besieged West Bank headquarters, Enderlin and his TV France 2 crew were turned back at an Israeli checkpoint. Before leaving, they tried to film the soldiers but were ordered to stop.

“Show me a written order that I cannot film here,” the producer demanded. “Instead of a paper, you’re going to get a bullet in your camera,” snarled an Israeli reservist, raising an automatic rifle. After more bickering, the French producer turned his back and headed toward his car. Then came the reservist’s parting shot. A bullet sliced through the air between Enderlin and his cameraman at chest level.

As Israel wages its biggest military campaign on the West Bank in 35 years, journalists trying to cover it are running up against the ultimate roadblock - Israeli bullets fired at them, often without warning. Veteran correspondents and a media watchdog group say the restrictions are the tightest they have ever seen here and are meant to conceal what the Israelis are doing in reoccupied Palestinian cities.

At least 20 journalists have come under Israeli fire since the offensive began March 29, according to the Paris-based watchdog group Reporters Without Borders. In most cases, the fire is apparently meant as warning shots, but five journalists have been wounded, including one American, Anthony Shadid of The Boston Globe.

A convoy of correspondents got the message on Friday when it approached Arafat’s compound in Ramallah and came under attack by soldiers in two Israeli army jeeps. Without warning, one of the jeeps rammed a clearly marked CNN vehicle, and soldiers threw several stun grenades. As the convoy retreated, soldiers fired plastic bullets, chipping the CNN car’s reinforced glass windows.

Five journalists from Agence France-Presse and Spanish television got the message on Sunday as they walked into the West Bank town of Yatta wearing flak jackets bearing the letters “TV” in big white tape and waving a white flag. They retreated under Israeli gunfire.

And journalists who stayed in Ramallah after Israel declared it a closed military zone got the message all last week. Israeli snipers took potshots at their hotel, and passing tanks opened fire into the air.

“The Israeli army is knowingly targeting journalists in a deliberate policy of intimidation,” Robert Menard, general secretary of Reporters Without Borders, said Sunday. “The Israelis want a news blackout so they can work in a vacuum and do as they like.”

Israel has declared most West Bank cities off-limits to reporters. Israeli officials warn that any reporter who enters those cities is provoking Israeli troops and violating Israeli law, even though Israel ceded the area to Palestinian control in the mid-1990s.

One of the enduring controversies of the offensive, for example, is whether 80 priests and monks inside Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity are hostages or willing companions of the 140 or so Palestinian gunmen who took refuge in the shrine after Israeli troops surrounded it last week. Journalists trying to get close to the church have been repelled by Israeli gunfire.

Israeli and foreign journalists had somewhat freer access to Israel’s conflict zones during the 1967 and 1973 Mideast wars, Israel’s war in Lebanon 20 years ago and the army’s previous actions against the intifada in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) Los Angeles Times.