Gazans were shocked as they emerged from the rubble

As the last Israeli tanks rumbled out of the Gaza Strip

the territory's shell-shocked residents crept out from the
rubble where many of them had cowered for more than
two days.

The extended Abid Rabah family, all 67 of them,
were confined by soldiers to a single room for most of
the Saturday-Sunday incursion after an Israeli missile
destroyed half of their house, including the kitchen.

"They would not even let us eat or drink,"
said Hanan Abid Rabah (34). "I asked the
soldiers to let me fetch some milk for my son
from the kitchen next door but
they prevented me. We were trapped
for two long nights."

In those nights hundreds of Israeli troops backed by
dozens of tanks trudged through the streets of the
crowded Jabaliya town and refugee camp, clashing
with Palestinian militants as warplanes pounded
dozens of houses to rubble.

As the explosions and gunfire thundered outside the
Abid Rabah home, the interior was a scene of blood
and chaos, with cries of hunger, tired children and the
moaning of two young men wounded in the fighting.

By the time ambulances were able to evacuate them,
Rami (23), and Mahmud Salih (21), were both in critical
condition after bleeding for more than a day.

Troops withdrew from Gaza on Monday after killing at
least 116 Palestinians, including dozens of women and
children, in a devastating five-day escalation of violence
including a string of air strikes in and around the territory.

Most of those who died were killed in the massive
assault on Jabaliya, north of Gaza City. On Monday,
mourning tents stood on nearly every cratered street.

One funeral tent stood outside the house of Marfat
Abu Shubak, whose two children, 12-year-old Iyad
and 16-year-old Jaklin, were killed by an Israeli
missile while they were walking to their grandmother's
house next door.

Merfat, who was at her mother's house at the time, was
at first told they had been wounded, but when she returned
to her home relatives told her they had already buried her
children.

"I want Iyad and Jacqueline," Abu Shubak cried, as she clung
to a bundle of clothes they once wore, huddling in one of the
rooms in the half of her house that is still standing.

Israel said the operation in Jabaliya, in which two of its soldiers
were killed, was aimed at rooting out the Palestinian militants
who have been firing crude, homemade rockets at southern
Israel on a near-daily basis.

"We must remember that Israel is protecting its citizens in
the south of the country and that with all due respect,
nothing will prevent us from this duty," Israel's Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert said on Saturday.

But the operation provoked an international outcry,
with even Israel's main ally the United States on Sunday
calling for an end to the violence.

As the army completed its withdrawal on Monday,
Palestinian bulldozers ploughed the rubble left by
Israeli bulldozers the night before.

At the ruins of the Abid Rabah house, Aisha,
the 82-year-old matriarch of the family, sat on a
demolished door, raising her hands to the sky.

"What do we have but God," she cried. "My whole life
I have never seen massacres like this... it's a new Nakba
(catastrophe)," she said, referring to the 1948 war and
creation of Israel.

The Hamas movement, which lost around three dozen
fighters in recent days, has vowed to continue
fighting Israel.

Amid the rumbling of the bulldozers and the wails of
the mourning, the Islamists on Monday proclaimed
victory through loudspeakers.

"The occupation has been defeated...
God bless the clean hands that have produced this victory."