Israel's terrifying operation still haunts Rafah residents

It had been a week since Eyad Yousef was home and saw his family, which was hemmed in, along with the rest of the neighbourhood, behind a cordon of Israeli tanks and soldiers.

Yousef made it home Monday, after the soldiers pulled away, ending the six-day siege. The 32-year-old was greeted by flattened greenhouses, torn-up streets and a number of smashed buildings.

"It looks very black," Yousef said during an interview in the Tel Sultan neighborhood, where Israeli forces began their incursion into the Rafah refugee camp last Tuesday. "The picture for me is very black."

That sadness was common in the crowded neighbourhood of about 25,000 people as visitors entered for the first time since Israel sealed off Tel Sultan. More than 40 Palestinians were killed and dozens injured during the offensive, which drew sharp criticism from abroad. There were no Israeli casualties.

Left behind in Tel Sultan were empty tracts and the splintered remains of greenhouses that had covered the agricultural areas. Trenches gouged the streets, leaving pools of raw sewage. Dozens of buildings appeared to have been damaged by bulldozers and tanks, or pockmarked by the shooting.

Open-sided mourning tents popped up as relatives were for the first time able to bury the dead, some stored in a makeshift morgue since last week.

For other residents, the fighting came crashing into their homes.

Zaki Judeh, a 58-year-old retired teacher, said his family was confined to a third-floor bedroom after an Israeli tank smashed through a wall on the main floor and soldiers turned the home into a sniper's lookout for 48 hours. No one was injured.

On Monday, Judeh received a steady stream of well-wishers who previously had been unable to make it to Tel Sultan.

Standing before a gaping hole in the wall, Judeh lashed out. "Shall I tell you about the continuous shooting of every kind of weapon? The movement of tanks and bulldozers that made the building shake? It felt like an earthquake,'' he said. "They wanted to terrify us."

© Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service