'UH, IT'S really fucking scary here," says the voice coming through a staticky cell phone connection. It's about 11 p.m. West Bank time, and I'm on the line with a young man from Oakland who is trapped in the war zone.

Two weeks ago Ryan Baghded, 26, arrived in the occupied territories to help launch the Palestine Independent Media Center, the latest addition to an anarchic network of 80 low-budget, highly radical news Web sites. A silicon-based update of the underground rags of the 1960s, the collectively run IMCs offer unfiltered news reports by DIY photographers and journalists. Now, with the occupied territories engulfed in armed conflict, Baghded's mission has gotten a tad more complicated.

On April 4, as I talk to Baghded, he's holed up in a battle-scarred building in a refugee camp, ducking incoming bullets and wondering if he's ever going to get back to the Bay Area. A few days ago Baghded – in case you're wondering, it's a nom de plume – left the relatively safe confines of the Bethlehem-based media center to report from the front lines, covering the Israeli invasion of the West Bank town of Beit Jala. "We're at a social center called Ibda'a in the Deheishe refugee camp," he explains. "The IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] are coming by constantly, shooting at everything. They're shooting at houses, they're shooting at random buildings, they're shooting in the streets. We're located right next to a United Nations ambulance center; they're shooting at that."

Our foreign correspondent tells me that two Americans and about 30 Europeans, all of them reporters or activists, are stuck inside the bullet-pocked structure. Rations are running low.

"Across the street from us somewhere is an IDF sniper," he says. "He's continually firing into our building even though the IDF knows all the people here are journalists or foreign nationals. Yesterday we were up in the window with a corporate media journalist who had a real expensive camera, and they shot right at us. They're firing on our building 10 or 12 times a day. We're standing in a room, and the fucking window blows out; the bullets go through walls – so yeah, we're pretty fucking concerned."

Retaliating for a horrific string of suicide bombings by Hamas and other militant groups, Israeli troops swept into the Palestinian territories March 29, decimating the headquarters of Yasser Arafat, placing Beit Jala and most other West Bank population centers under martial law, and killing at least 200 Palestinians and wounding more than 1,500 in what has been the worst fighting in two decades.

At press time the Israeli military, which has encountered widespread resistance, has lost 24 soldiers in battle. In the streets just outside Baghded's window, Palestinian preteens hoping to blow up Israeli vehicles are making crude homemade bombs. "They're putting kerosene tanks in the streets and burying them with trash," he says. "The idea is that when IDF tanks or armored personnel carriers come along, they'll roll over these bombs." Meanwhile, Palestinian gunmen are firing on the tanks and other heavy vehicles as they lumber down the road.

"I tried to leave the building yesterday and got shot at with automatic fire by the IDF," says Baghded, who under normal circumstances writes about police brutality and related concerns for the San Francisco Indy Media site. "You can't even walk out of the building, let alone leave the city."

Baghded is only one of dozens of reporters who've been shot at by Israeli forces during the second intifada. During the past 18 months the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists has documented 19 serious attacks on journalists by Israeli troops, including the March 31 shooting of a Boston Globe reporter and the slaying of Rafael Ciriello, an Italian photojournalist who was apparently machine-gunned by a tank last month. "The Israeli army has made it clear that it doesn't want journalists in the area," says Joel Campagna, director of the committee's Middle East program. The Palestinian Authority, which shut down the Ramallah bureau of Arab TV network Al Jazeera for several days last year, has also attacked, beaten, and censored journalists, though to a far lesser extent.

On April 5 I get an e-mail from Beit Jala. "We can see another tank approaching, which assuredly means another intense gunfight near us, in fact, it is starting right now. everyone is hitting the floor but i just dont care anymore," the American writes.

A few miles away, at the headquarters of Palestine Indy Media, the situation isn't as grim. Five volunteers, including a San Diegan named Sean Riordan, are camped out in the office, living on coffee, frantically adding updates to the site (jerusalem.indymedia.org) around the clock. "The great thing about the site is that people can post to it from anywhere in the West Bank," Riordan tells me.

The first Indy Media Center opened in Seattle in 1999 to provide "grassroots, noncorporate" coverage of the anti-World Trade Organization protests in that town. Since then the centers have spread virus-style, with outlets springing up around the planet, including several in the global south. For the most part the sites have done a decent job of documenting big protests but have largely failed to produce readable reportage on a regular basis or do any real muckraking.

The Palestinian effort, though, is actually pretty interesting. "Yesterday at Al Razi hospital in Jenin, doctors and medics watched helplessly as 28-year-old Nidal Al Haj bled to death inside the hospital yard," one April 6 report reads. "Apache helicopters have attacked and seriously damaged around 50 houses in the western side of the camp, 20 people are reported injured, bleeding in the street. Reports from the inhabitants are that there are 15 dead bodies."

An April 5 post describes the trials of a two-person Palestinian ambulance crew: they "were detained at gunpoint for three hours with their hands tied behind their backs and guns to their heads before being warned not to try to save anyone else."