MIDDLE EAST: Palestinians picked through the rubble of dozens of homes in a sprawling refugee camp over the weekend after Israel ended its most powerful assault in the Gaza Strip in four years of bloodshed.
A spokesman for Prime Minister Mr Ariel Sharon said the army would return to northern Gaza if there was more Palestinian rocket fire into Israel, which killed two toddlers on September 29th and triggered the 17-day Israeli offensive.
More than 100 Palestinians were killed when Israel sent in tanks, infantry and armoured bulldozers after pledging to hit militants hard before Sharon's planned removal of settlers and soldiers from Gaza in 2005.
"It is part of a continuing planned series of Israeli attacks to attempt to bring our people to their knees, and this, of course, will never be achieved," Palestinian Prime Minister Mr Ahmed Qurie said in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
Residents in Jabalya, a refugee camp of 100,000 and the scene of fierce fighting between troops and gunmen, said Israeli tanks and bulldozers churning through its alleyways had destroyed dozens of homes and torn up roads and water pipes.
"The whole house is rubble and there is no way we can find anything," said Ezzeya Daher, 50, as hundreds of people picked through mounds of debris to search for belongings. "Now we are refugees for a second time."
Relaxing its military grip as Palestinians began the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan, Israel reopened main roads in Gaza that it had blocked at the start of the offensive.
For Aisha Abu Al-Jedian, 70, history had come full circle. Sitting on the wreckage of her home, she was a refugee from a village near what is now the southern Israeli town of Sderot, where the two children were killed.
"Let them continue to rocket Sderot until the leave us alone," she said.
Palestinian officials estimated more than 100 houses had been destroyed in northern Gaza. They said it would take two days to arrive at a final figure.
One four-storey building in Jabalya had about 200 bullet holes. Its owner, 70-year-old Abed Abu Warda, said he and 30 members of his extended family had squeezed into one room to try to avoid the gunfire.
Palestinian medics said Israeli forces killed at least 62 militants and 43 other Palestinians, believed to be civilians, during the operation. Gunmen killed three Israelis in north Gaza and a Thai farm worker in a Jewish settlement.
"We are determined not to leave Gaza under the hail of Qassam rocket fire," said Mr Sharon's spokesman, Raanan Gissin.
Qassam attacks have complicated Mr Sharon's efforts to overcome rightist opposition to his plan to remove all 21 Gaza settlements and four of 120 in the West Bank, starting next May.
Polls show most Israelis support a Gaza pull-out, which goes to a parliamentary vote on October 25th.