The army destroyed or removed the files and records of many Palestinian ministries and institutions, ranging from high-level financial documents to the records of school graduations.

The Palestinians were yesterday still clearing up the debris. The damage is estimated at tens of millions of dollars. Some said it would take years to rebuild the information that was stolen and taken to Israel. In many cases, the data has gone forever.

The Palestinians claim that Israel set out to destroy the infrastructure of their emerging state. The Israeli army insists its aim was purely to destroy the "infrastructure of terror". An army spokesman, Lieutenant-Colonel Olivier Rafowicsz, said yesterday: "We are not in a war against the Palestinian Authority or the Palestinian people. We are in a war against terrorism."

But the army's interpretation of what constitutes the "infrastructure of terror" has turned out to be a broad one: the soldiers trashed schools, banks, hospitals, cultural centres, stores, human rights offices and radio and television stations, including one called Peace and Love.

Some of the wreckage was wanton and spiteful, carried out by bored soldiers billeted in Palestinian buildings.

The looting was small-scale. The worst of the damage was systematic. Police stations were wrecked and all the Palestinian Authority's ministries, except the ministry of planning and the ministry of sport, were ransacked. The main target was computers, whose hard drives were removed and taken to Israel.

Among the trashed institutions were:

· Aziz Shaheen girls' school

in the But al-Hawa district. With 800 pupils it is one of the biggest schools on the West Bank, and it has a good academic reputation, especially in science and technology. Ten Israeli tanks were parked in its playground for three weeks; snipers used the upper floor.

Children returning to the school on Monday found it surrounded by barbed wire, rubbish and spent explosives. They were told by the principal, Mariam Masharka, 45, to go home until the school was cleaned up and repaired.

Sabrine Wadir, 15, a pupil, said: "Our first sight was the playground, surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, as if it was a jail. The lock to my classroom was broken. They destroyed pictures of flowers, martyrs, our president."

Musical instruments were looted, books were torn and piled in the corridors. Anti-Arab graffiti was scrawled in every corridor. Among the debris was a tapestry in a broken glass frame, saying "Peace and Justice for Palestine".

An Israeli army spokesman, Captain Ron Edelheit, responded: "If you have a platoon staying, there are bound to be scratches."

· Mattin human rights group which has an office at a crossroads on al-Haq street.

Salwa Daibis, a partner in the Mattin group, said: "A metal door had been flung 50 metres away. It took me half an hour to locate my desk, upside down, covered with other things, tins of food, Coca-Cola tins. The cash box was not there.

"I couldn't find my computer. I found a [computer] shell. I think it is mine. The hard disk is gone. Some monitors are missing. This is 20 years of work. My whole life is there. This is an assault against an entire population to damage the fabric of society."

Capt Edelheit's response: "The human rights organisations are not always fair, blonde, blue-eyed Europeans." Some of them were linked to terrorists, he claimed.

· Housing Bank for Trade and Finance one block from Manara Square. The headquarters of a Jordanian bank that provides loans for building homes.

On April 3, a tank fired three rounds through its plate-glass windows. The entire contents of two floors were demolished.

Talib Muleseh, 45, operations manager for the bank, which has 32 staff, 25,000 customers and is worth $51m, said: "There was no reason for this. It is banking terror. It is about destroying the Palestinian infrastructure. The bank supported the Palestinian economy."

He estimated the cost of repairs at more than $200,000, which includes two new cash-in-the wall machines at $40,000 each.

Capt Edelheit said there were buildings the army had not intended to attack, but had been forced to after coming under fire: "Where they fired at us, we fired back."

· Preventative security force's HQ Betunia, west of Ramallah, was the building most badly battered by Israeli tanks and rockets.

Before the assault, it resembled a huge hilltop fortress. Now the compound is gutted, the outside walls black from smoke and punctured with holes. A fresh Palestinian flag flies from the ruins.

The compound was the headquarters of Colonel Jibril Rajoub, who heads the most professional of the Palestinian police forces. The preventative security forces were trained by the CIA, and Mr Rajoub maintains close contacts with US security officials and with Israel. The compound was built with CIA cash.

Mr Rajoub, standing amid the rubble from the battle, said: "An attack of this sort on the preventative security service reflects a desire to destroy the infrastructure of which preventative security is the backbone." The Palestinians ask how are they to meet Israel's demands to arrest militants if their security apparatus is knocked out.

Capt Edelheit said: "There were 200 armed terrorists inside. Some of them were policemen and some were terrorists." He added that policemen during the day sometimes become terrorists at night.

· Puppet theatre in the But al-hawa district. Soldiers occupied the small theatre used by the puppeteer Nideal al-Khatib, 36, who takes his shows to schools in the West Bank.

"I used the puppets to get across the message that water is precious. My backdrops were used by the soldiers to cover the windows," he said, holding the destroyed sheets. "They stole three of my puppets. They left these two. Maybe they did not like them."

Israel's response: As with the school, some damage is inevitable in places where soldiers are billeted.

· Land registry office 200 metres east of Manara Square, holds the deeds to land records on the West Bank. Old pink maps, with detailed portions of land in faint ink, were scattered around the floor.

Najiba Suhal, 30, the assistant director, said: "The army destroyed the entrance to the office and took computers. We are trying to establish what has been taken. Some of these records go back to the Turkish era."

Israeli response: No specific information about what happened at the location.

· Education ministry in north Ramallah The soldiers took so much material from the ministry that they needed a van to carry it away.

Salah Sobani, a ministry employee, said that when the Israelis arrived, "I opened all the doors I had keys for and they blasted the rest".

Computers were piled in the middle of one floor after being stripped of hard disks containing a host of information, from instructions to teachers through to graduation lists.

Dr Gabi Baramki, the authority's adviser on academic affairs, said: "So much damage in just one hour."

Israeli response: Israel regularly protests that Palestinian textbooks incite hatred against the Jewish state. "In their computers, we are trying to find incitement to hate," Capt Edelheit said.

"We are finding glorification of suicide bombers and when we have the information, we will issue it."

· Peace and Love radio station which has been broadcasting since 1995 to a target audience of young people. It has a staff of 25.

Its founder, Mutazb Seiso, 36, said that the station's transmitter, tapes, mini-disks, mixers and all the other equipment needed to broadcast had been destroyed. He estimated the cost of the damage at more than $250,000 and said it would take months to get back on air - provided there was help from radio stations abroad.