BUREIJ, Gaza Strip, 7 December 2002 — Celebrations for the Eid Al-Fitr holidays were violently cut short yesterday in Al-Bureij, the poorest Gaza refugee camp, by an Israeli Army incursion which killed 10 Palestinians.

Israeli troops backed by tanks and helicopter gunships swept into the refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, provoking a gunbattle and killing 10 people, Palestinian witnesses and medics said.

In Jenin, a Palestinian man was killed and five were wounded late yesterday in another Israeli incursion into the village of Zila.

Witnesses said 15 tanks moved in, and there were clashes between soldiers and local people throwing stones.

The incursion into Al-Bureij camp, which the Palestinians branded an Israeli massacre, came a few hours after Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon claimed Al-Qaeda terror network was operating in the Gaza Strip. A charge staunchly denied by the Palestinian leadership.

Men called through mosque loudspeakers for people to come out and battle the Israeli soldiers, who entered the camp just after midnight.

Palestinian residents said at least three of the dead were killed by a missile fired from a helicopter gunship. They said at least seven of the nine men and one woman killed were civilians. Two of those killed by the Israelis were policemen who defended the camp, they said.

The high death toll and the timing of the assault, during the Eid holidays, enraged Palestinians and tens of thousands attended an unusually large funeral for the 10 victims.

Mourners, some of them masked, chanted “revenge, revenge” as the bodies were carried through the camp’s narrow streets on men’s shoulders.

“It is a new massacre. What happened is a continuation of the massacres against the Palestinian people,” Palestinian President Yasser Arafat said in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

“This is Israeli terrorism against our children, our women and our holy shrines from Rafah (in southern Gaza) to Jenin (in the West Bank). Isn’t what they are doing daily, terrorism?”

An aide to Arafat, Nabil Abu Rudeina, said the Palestinians would call on the United Nations Security Council to hold a special session on the violence and to consider sending international observers to the region.

Hamas said two of the 10 Palestinians killed in the raid belonged to its military wing — the Ezzedin Al-Qassam Brigades.

According to Israeli Army commander in Gaza, Brig. Yisrael Ziv, troops entered the camp to blow up a wanted Palestinian’s house and to arrest three subordinates who belonged to a cell allegedly responsible for blowing up Israeli tanks.

Sitting in a corner of her parents’ half-destroyed bedroom, 11-year-old Suheir Abu Khusa clung to her toy cat which meows when you press its belly.

“This is my singing cat, my daddy bought it for me for the Eid.”

“We heard a terrible noise, an explosion and my house was destroyed. I took my little sister in my arms and we hid under the bed,” she said.

The army dynamited the house of Ayman Sheshniya, a wanted Palestinian from the local Popular Resistance Committee suspected of being responsible for a string of attacks against Jewish settlers and soldiers in the central Gaza Strip.

In this wretchedly poor refugee camp, the first items which families were trying to salvage from the wreckage were schoolbooks.

As the sun rose on the battered refugee camp, children sifted through the rubble and the crumpled bits of corrugated iron roofs in an attempt to piece their schoolbooks back together.

Suheir’s father Abdelfattah, 60, whose house was seriously damaged when Sheshniya’s home was dynamited, explained how he protected his family when the clashes broke out outside his modest concrete home.

“I first heard armed clashes. The tanks shelled the area. I took my six girls, my wife and my sister to the safest room.

“It felt like a war was going on outside. We all got down on the floor, me on top of my children to protect them, stones were falling and flying all over the place,” he said.

They later all ran to seek shelter in brother Yaaqub’s house, only to find it had partially collapsed in the blast.

The 21-year-old wife of Sheshniya’s brother who owned the house which was blown up, recounts her horrific night.

“My husband and I were on the bed downstairs with our two children next to us and all of a sudden somebody knocked on our bedroom door. My husband thought it was his brother but it was a group of soldiers,” Hanaa said, standing by the remains of her home.

“They grabbed my husband by the neck, handcuffed and beat him up... Then they took him away and rounded up all the women in the building. They started shelling and spraying the camp with bullets, a helicopter fired two missiles,” she added.

Palestinian witnesses said soldiers, along with 25 tanks and several helicopters, thrust into Bureij under cover of darkness, raking the area with fire as they entered the camp. A helicopter fired a missile into a street, killing at least three people and splattering a nearby wall with blood, witnesses said. Some of the dead bodies were dismembered.

“It was as if the doors of hell were opened in our camp by the helicopters and the tanks,” said 20-year-old resident Mohammed Al-Maqadama. “They have made this a bloody Eid.”

Hassan Safi, 49, said he was 300 yards away in his home when an explosion rocked the neighborhood. He said he thought the blast was from a tank shell.

“I rushed with my sons to the place, which was all destroyed,” Safi said. “I myself took out two people. The helicopter was firing with machine guns at us, making it difficult to move.”

One tank shell narrowly missed a Palestinian home, sending shrapnel flying and wounding five people, medics said. A second home, belonging to a Palestinian wanted by Israel, was blown up by Israeli troops, witnesses said.

A doctor at the local hospital said the 10 Palestinians killed included two pairs of brothers, and three men from one family. All the dead were in their 20s and 30s. Doctors said 12 Palestinians were wounded in the violence. A Palestinian teenager was critically wounded by Israeli gunfire in the northern West Bank town of Tulkarm.