By Gerald Butt BBC correspondent in Nicosia

What a difference a few hours can make.

Cyprus says the gunmen are being treated as guests rather than prisoners

The 13 Palestinian gunmen facing deportation started the day amid the squalor in the besieged Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.

By the afternoon they were enjoying a view of the Mediterranean Sea from their rooms on the fourth floor of the 3-star Flamingo Beach tourist hotel in Larnaca in Cyprus.

The exiles arrived at Larnaca airport on board an RAF Hercules transport aircraft. They looked tired, dazed and bewildered as they stepped out into the blazing sun.

One man was carried on a stretcher to an ambulance. Another limped with the group to waiting police vehicles.

For most of the 13 men, this was their first experience of going abroad.

'Holidays as normal'

The journey to the hotel, in a police convoy, took only a few minutes.

The deportees will not be allowed out of the hotel

There, startled Russian tourists watched the 13 men being led into the hotel and up to the fourth floor, the whole of which has been taken over for them.

Flamingo Beach manager Anthonis Josephides said that as far as he was concerned, the Palestinians were free to use all the hotel facilities, including the rooftop swimming pool.

And he insisted that for the rest of the hotel's customers it was "holidays as normal".

The Cypriot authorities say the 13 exiles are being treated as guests rather than prisoners.

But for their own protection they will not be allowed out of the hotel, and a police guard has been mounted on the building.

The authorities have not ruled out the possibility of the Palestinians being visited by their families.

Coming to terms

The main hope of the Cypriot Government is that EU leaders will decide quickly which European states are going to take the 13 Palestinian deportees.

When the authorities offered to provide transit facilities, they stressed that the arrangement should only be temporary.

Nevertheless, Cyprus will be pleased to have the opportunity of playing a key role in helping the EU in this way - with the island hoping for EU admission in 2004.

Such considerations will not interest the 13 deported Palestinian as they wait to be told about their final countries of exile.

And they will hardly be in the mood to enjoy the facilities of a holiday hotel in Larnaca.

More likely they will be trying to come to terms with the implications of that journey of a few hours from the Church of the Nativity to Cyprus.