"It hurts the hearts, it stirs up hatred of Americans and it's better that way," said an Egyptian economics student, Sherif, commenting on footage aired daily on Qatar's Al-Jazeera satellite television.

A terrible picture of a coffin containing the bodies of a woman and her baby, a pacifier still stuck in his mouth, was displayed on the front page of a major newspaper here, Al-Akhbar.

Next to it, a picture showed a child lying on the ground, his head bathed in blood, and another two bodies surrounded by the feet of people watching.

"It's almost sickening, we switch for one channel to the other and find the same pictures again," said Lydia, a political science student in the University of Cairo.

"These pictures should be shown in order to mobilise people around the world, so that everyone knows what's happening," said another student, Medhat.

"The 'clean war' has become the dirtiest of wars, the bloodiest, the most destructive. Smart weapons have become deliberately stupid, blindly killing people in markets and popular neighbourhoods," wrote Egypt's leading newspaper Al-Ahram in an editorial.

In an advertisement in Al-Ahram, a local teenage magazine, Aladin, published the cover page of its next issue featuring a photographic montage of a US fighter plane flying over a veiled mother fleeing with her children.

"Massive destruction," and "aggression on Iraq's children" will be the titles of the main articles in the next Aladin issue.

Civilian casualties "are drawing rivers of blood separating the people of Iraq from the coalition forces supposedly coming to free them and bring democracy," wrote Makram Mohamed Ahmed, the editor in chief of Al-Mussawar, a weekly close to the regime of President Hosni Mubarak, a key US Arab ally.

In Syria, an official newspaper poured scorn on the democratic values promised by the US-British military coalition invading Iraq.

"The Iraqi people are getting a taste of the 'freedom values' they were promised: they have the free choice of dying slaughtered, burnt or under the rubble," wrote Ath-Thawra.

Syria's ruling Baath party newspaper, Al-Baath, said "the terror massacres perpetrated by the invading forces against Iraqi civilians ... have been considered by international organisations as crimes against humanity."

"One cannot save a people through killing," said the United Arab Emirates' newspaper Al-Khaleej. "Everyday is seeing new crimes and blunders," it added, comparing US words of regret over civilian casualties to "an assassin attending the funeral of his victim."

Another UAE daily, Al-Bayan, charged "the war is an attempt to terrorise Iraqi civilians."

All UAE newspapers spread out on several columns pictures of the casualties caused by Tuesday's bombing at Hilla, south of Baghdad, and the comment of the International Committee of the Red Cross describing it as "real horror."

Hospital officials in Hilla, 80 kilometers (50 miles) south of Baghdad, said 33 civilians were killed, most of them women and children, and about 400 others wounded.

SPACE.WIRE