Israelis Withdraw From North Gaza

As friends and relatives sought to console him outside the morgue, Hajaj said Israeli artillery shells had been landing a football field away from his home since the previous day. An Israeli military spokesman said no artillery was being fired near the area when the blast occurred but that an airstrike had targeted suspected Palestinian gunmen in the neighborhood at about the same time.

After several days in which fighting was centered here in the orchards, houses and sandy streets of Atatara, in Beit Lahiya, hundreds of Palestinian residents combed through the damaged neighborhood.

Like the fighting, most of the damage was confined to a swath of dunes, olive and citrus groves and houses roughly a half-mile long and equally wide along this city's western edge. The Israeli military pushed into the area to increase the distance between fields that officials say are used by Palestinian rocket launchers and their targets in southern Israel.

"This is terror," said Hussein Zayed, 28, a member of the Palestinian presidential guard, as he looked over his ravaged home behind a wall where palm, lemon and olive trees uprooted by Israeli bulldozers were being gathered into piles. "Not a single shot was fired from this place."

Dozens of Israeli troops took up positions in houses here as the operation began, including in Zayed's living room. His second story was strewn with the pieces of a shattered television set, sofa cushions and masonry from the blown-out wall that now offers a view of a ruined greenhouse in the courtyard below.

A breeze through the jagged hole slowly pushed a twisted fan dangling from a ceiling pocked with shrapnel marks and bullet holes. The computer Zayed used to pursue an accounting degree at Al-Quds Open University was in pieces, the hens and pigeons he kept in a coop on the first floor gone. The soldiers had left behind only a bag of sandwich rolls.

Itidal al-Ajouri had dashed from her family's apartment during intense fighting Friday afternoon, along with her six children. Her husband, Salah, a colonel in the Palestinian National Forces, was at work at the time and said he could hear gunfire crackling behind her when she phoned him for help.

The family returned Saturday to a picture of devastation: piles of cassette tapes, splintered cabinet doors, clothes hangers and blankets thrown about the previously neat apartment. Bullet holes in the building behind theirs suggested the apartment had been caught in intense crossfire, probably leaving the family with little choice but to find a new place to live.

"We will close this up now and stay somewhere else," said Rasha, who is studying microbiology at Al-Azhar University in Gaza. "What else can we do?"