MIDDLE EAST: Israel yesterday continued its assault on the Palestinian refugee camp of Rafah in Gaza. Nuala Haughey went there and talked to the camp's inhabitants.
Majid Al Hams decided the time had come to flee his family home in Gaza's Rafah refugee camp around lunchtime yesterday after a bullet whizzed past his teenage daughter Iman's head as she was stepping out of the kitchen.
So he piled up his donkey-drawn cart with a fresh load of belongings and headed to an empty warehouse in neighbouring Rafah town, a safe distance from the flashpoint border crossing with Egypt which was pounded afresh early yesterday by Israeli army helicopters.
The 37-year-old electrician started squirreling his household belongings in the hastily converted breezeblock building near Rafah town's Al Salam mosque a few days ago, paying the handsome monthly rental sum of 400 shekels (€75).
In one sectioned off area of the sand and concrete floored structure he had already stashed windows in their frames, removed from his home, as well as bedding and kitchen equipment.
The Al Hams family home is further south, near the Egyptian border in Block O of the impoverished Rafah camp where some 90,000 Palestinian refugees live in dusty squalor. The handsome four-storey house is uncomfortably close to the Israeli patrol road known as the Philadelphia corridor which has been the scene of fighting and air strikes in recent days.
"The house is very dangerous because the gunfire is continuing," explained Al Hams, as several of his ten children gathered at his heels. "This is the worst; last October they demolished 114 houses in the camp but it wasn't like this time with Apache helicopters firing missiles at people."
Israel says it is targeting the Rafah camp to destroy tunnels beneath houses which are used by Palestinians to smuggle weapons from Egypt.
Seven Israeli soldiers were killed in this area last week, five during a strike on their armoured vehicle on a tunnel destruction exercise and two while searching for their colleagues' scattered remains.
Since then the army destroyed about 100 houses near the patrol road, some of which it claims were used as cover by militants during attacks.
These demolitions have left more than 1,000 Palestinians homeless and drawn worldwide condemnation from human rights groups and from the EU presidency, as well as rare criticism from the United States.
The Al Hams family are among hundreds who have in recent days packed their meagre belongings and moved away from the danger zone under threat that Israel is preparing a major follow-up offensive, named Operation Rainbow.
They have set up homes in pitched tents provided by the International Red Cross and in Rafah's oddly impressive soccer stadium.
Israel's Minister for Defence, Mr Shaul Mofaz, has said the aim of the operation - scheduled to be its biggest in Gaza in recent years - is to create "a new security order" in the strip.
The first phase of Operation Rainbow kicked off early yesterday when helicopters struck the Tel Sultan neighbourhood on the outskirts of the Rafah camp.
Up to 20 Palestinians, at least eight of them armed, were killed as troops searched houses, and there were reports of more than 30 being injured.
The death toll kept creeping up during the day and locals in Tel Sultan said they knew of two more bodies of children aged 13 and 16 which ambulances were unable to retrieve because of heavy shooting.
A charity worker from Tel Sultan who wanted to be named only as Mohammed said his family were pinned into one room of their house while tanks rumbled outside.
"People are cowering in their homes because of the shooting, we are ten people in one room," he said, speaking by telephone from his prison-home early yesterday afternoon.
Large crowds gathered outside the 50-bed Abu Yousef Al Najar Hospital in Rafah town all day yesterday as fleets of ambulances ferried the dead and injured.
The morgue quickly became full and bodies were double packed in its storage racks. When it filled up, more bodies were temporarily stored in a store front next to a falafel stand, sheathed in white cloth.
On a bed in one hospital ward sat 15-year-old Hamid Abu Hamra, recovering from a shrapnel wounds in his stomach after a missile exploded feet from him last Thursday when he went to Rafah camp's Block O to see the Israeli incursion.
Hamid's teenage curiosity cost the lives of four of his friends in the same incident. A tube from his nose drained blood from his internal wounds into a plastic sac lying on the floor.
In another room crowds of men donated blood. Down the corridor the hospital director, Dr Ali Ibrahim Mousa, sat in his office beneath a portrait of the Palestinian leader, Mr Yasser Arafat, the phones ringing non-stop.
He said five ambulances were isolated in the Rafah camp area, exposed to Israeli fire. The staff had taken refuge in local houses, he said.
Back in Block O, Majid Al Hams took us to visit his sparsely furnished family home.
He pointed out the small hole in the opaque living room window where the bullet which narrowly missed his daughter, Imam (17) had entered the house at around 2.30 p.m. yesterday.
"I was screaming, I squealed a lot and went to my father and mother and began to cry," said Iman, tugging her black and grey headscarf around her neck.
Her father peeled back a heavy rug covering another window to reveal an Israeli look-out tower in the distance, rising from the dark brown fence that marks the start of the Philadelphia corridor.
"It is possible that they will invade this area tonight and demolish the house," he said.
The rest of the extended family of up to 40 people gathered round, talking excitedly over each other.
Fourteen-year-old Yasser showed off a bullet scar in his left calf sustained during an Israeli incursion in the neighbourhood last October.
The family denied that they had ever allowed militants to use the house, where they have lived for some 30 years.
Majid's parents fled their village near the Israeli port town of Ashkelon during the 1948 war which followed the creation of the Jewish state.
"This is the second time that I will be made a refugee in my homeland," said his mother, Miriam. "Sharon took all our land and he's following us even here. Is it fair that we have to leave this house where we are the owners?"