The Independent Media Centre (IMC) in Palestine was just a few of days old when, on April 1, the Israeli army launched Operation Protective Wall, its latest and most intense incursion into the West Bank. Hours later, the IMC - a web-based alternative news network - had turned into a hectic newsroom, information source and coordination point, all rolled into one.

From then on, the work of its four volunteers, holed up under curfew in a Bethlehem office, was watched around the clock, all over the world. While professional news sources initially drew blanks on the details of the latest conflict, IMC Palestine was feeding reports live from the streets of Palestine onto the internet.

"We've had press from all over the world calling for contacts, interviews, statements - the works," says Sarah Irving, a 26-year-old researcher from Manchester, one of the four IMC volunteers. "The office has turned into press central, all four phone lines going 24/7."

The centre was able to direct media requests for eyewitness interviews from conflict areas in Ramallah, Nablus and Bethlehem. Within days, IMC Palestine had set up a "bleeper" system that paged news alerts to a three-page list of media correspondents on the ground, and faxed updates to the major news bureaux based in Jerusalem. By April 4, its website - updated hourly - was receiving 350,000 hits, and by later that week around 600,000.

Pivotal to this extraordinary information flow is the operational ethos of the "indymedia" global network of alternative news, to which the new Palestine centre belongs. Websites such as IMC typically comprise two sections: the first, written by volunteers, is a summary of the second, a "breaking newswire", fed by a system of open publishing. Effectively, such a system means that anyone with access to the internet can, through a distinctly un-techie process, load text, picture, audio and video news onto the wire. Run, literally, by the people, for the people, indymedia centres around the world (80 sites, spanning six continents) attempt to democratise the process of news reporting. Their message is: "Don't hate the media; be the media."

Months prior to launching, IMC Palestine had supplied the local community, already cynical about western media bias, with information on how to be a part of this "global media revolution". Thus, from the onset of Israel's military action, scores of medics, lawyers, independent journalists, peace activists, human rights groups and friends or families in contact with those trapped inside conflict areas were on the case - publishing directly to the site, or phoning reports through to the IMC centre.

As Israel intensified its attacks and denied media access to the conflict areas, the IMC Palestine website was able to report the most gruesome details of the attacks. It was the first to report that women and children were being used as human shields in front of tanks; that the Israeli army would declare an end to the curfew and then shoot at Palestinians emerging onto the streets; that houses were being bulldozed with people still inside them; that dogs were eating human corpses.

Numerous eyewitness reports phoned in to the site declared that a massacre was taking place. One phone message from the refugee camp at Jenin stated simply: "Help us, we are going to die, please help us."

Of course, any freedom is subject to abuse and an open-to-all reporting system is no exception.

"Any news, we follow it from its roots," says Bilal Selemeh, 25, Palestinian IMC volunteer and a sociology student at Birzeit University. Volunteers to IMCs worldwide monitor their own newswires and "hide" postings deemed racist, sexist, otherwise oppressive or just plain irrelevant (advertising or party political sloganeering).

"People have been posting threats to members of the international peace group and their families," says Heather Guyton, an Arab-American volunteer living in Bethlehem. "We've had people spamming us, sending racist and abusive multiple postings. That's one of the reasons why we've had 24-hour monitoring of the site, because it takes loads of time to take that rubbish down."

Both IMC Palestine and IMC Israel websites were, Guyton adds, temporarily shut down by a "Zionist hacker", until the indymedia global network of "geeks" rushed to the rescue in cyberspace. The centre has also received numerous crank calls, mostly from Israel, but also from the UK and the US.

"It can get very depressing," says Irving. "We've had people accusing us of being anti-semitic, neo-Nazi holocaust deniers, or calling to say, 'Why don't you fuck off and die with your suicide bomber friends?'"

There are countless other head-aches too, not least the constant fear of attack from the Israeli army, whose tanks and armoured personnel carriers often take pot shots at the building. With its 20 Palestinian volunteers stuck at home under curfew, the IMC office was staffed by three internationals - and Selemeh, who was not at his home in Deheishe in the West Bank when the attacks began. Trapped together under curfew in the centre, with reserves of food, energy and patience running low, the four had to organise quickly in response to their increasing significance as a news source.

The centre's shaky net connection collapsed completely after the Israeli army raided the offices of Palestine Online, the local internet service provider. But the global IMC network has its own unique back-up: while the Palestine site administrators were offline, the newswire, being fed directly by its users, kept reporting.

Moreover, international peace volunteers in Palestine phoned live reports back to IMCs in their home countries, where volunteers could update their native sites and, in a tidy loop, cross-post the latest details back to the IMC Palestine newswire. Now back online through a single laptop with an Israeli net connection, the Palestine centre can report only in English - the laptop isn't Arabic-enabled.

Not just a media resource, the IMC Palestine site, set up specifically to "report the struggle", has now evolved into a forum of global solidarity. Postings of phone interviews with Palestinians under curfew attract page after page of words from well-wishers.

"I have been telling my friends about your support," writes Ashraf, a 25-year-old Palestinian Christian in Ramallah, responding to some of these messages. "This support is so important. We live in a prison and feel like we are so alone here, so it's very encouraging to have such replies."