Heaps of rubble picked over by Palestinians trying to save something of their shattered lives were all that remained Wednesday of a Gaza Strip community after an overnight visit by Israeli tanks and bulldozers.

Rafah's Brasil district in the south of the Gaza Strip looked as if an earthquake had hit it following the second incursion by the Israeli army into autonomous Palestinian territory in two weeks.

Out of 19 houses inhabited the day before, only piles of broken breeze-blocks and twisted corrugated iron lay among uprooted palm-trees and slanting electricity poles with broken wires.

Residents said the bulldozers, protected by tanks, penetrated some 100 metres (yards) into territory that, under Israeli-Palestinian agreements, should be under total Palestinian control, to demolish their humble homes.

The Israelis had burst at midnight through an opening in a high concrete wall dividing Palestinian territory from an Israeli military highway.

Before withdrawing in the early hours of Wednesday they fired heavy machine-guns and assault rifles without let-up, killing a 17-year-old boy, Mahmud Akel, and wounding a dozen other people.

The immaculate white walls of the small al-Nur mosque located just inside Palestinian territory were pitted with bullet holes, the windows smashed.

Mahmud al-Shaer, 61, standing in front of what was his home only a few hours before, said: "On the stroke of midnight two bulldozers came towards my house and the soldiers fired a fierce burst.

"I escaped in my pyjamas -- I couldn't save anything, not even my personal papers."

In one of the houses that escaped total destruction, an elderly Palestinian woman clothed in black pointed to her steel front door, holed by heavy-calibre Israeli bullets.

Across the street Rostom Wida, 47, was trying to extricate an old television set and a few pieces of furniture from a confused mass of debris.

Picking up toys scattered over the ground, the father of nine said: "I smelled dust -- we fled and I heard a loud noise. I realised they were demolishing our home. They destroyed everything we possessed."

An Israeli military spokesman called the raid "a limited operation aimed at targets used by terrorists in Rafah" and "an act of legitimate defence."

But Wida denied that the houses were being used by Palestinian to attack Israelis.

"It's impossible," he said. "Families with young children were sleeping there."

On Wednesday, Israeli troops were still firing machine-guns and rifles from a position a few hundred metres (yards) away, while a group of Palestinian youths watched from a distance.

A bearded young man carrying a Kalashnikov assault rifle said "the Israelis claim that the houses were used a refuge by fighters. It's a lie. All we do is patrol and resist Israeli incursions."

The Palestinian Authority Wednesday protested at the Israeli raid, saying Israel bore "full responsibility for its aggressive policy".

A spokesman warned in a statement that "Israel's security cannot be realised at the expense of the Palestinians", adding that the security and stability of the whole region were endangered.

Angry crowds cried for vengeance as they buried Akel and Mohammad Abu Jazar, a 57-year-old Palestinian police captain killed on Tuesday, in a Rafah cemetery.

Activists of the extremist Palestinian Hamas and Islamic Jihad movements as well as the popular resistance committees of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, which have ignored orders to disband, threatened reprisals.

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