what happened here," Jamal Yussuf declared yesterday. Yussuf, an UNRWA worker, lives in the Yabneh refugee camp, one of several that make up the large camp at Rafah on the Egyptian border. As he spoke, he gestured toward his four-story house, taken over by Israel Defense Forces troops in an operation in the camp from Friday until yesterday. Almost all the walls of Yussuf's home are riddled with shrapnel. Its dusty contents have been thrown to the floor and holes have been drilled in the walls to serve as shooting slits for IDF snipers.

Dozens of tanks, armored personnel carriers, and bulldozers took part in the operation. Along with helicopter gunships, they sowed indescribable destruction. Hundreds of homes along several kilometers, and within 200 meters of the border, have been destroyed during the three years of the intifada. At the end of last week, the IDF began a special operation along To'ameh Street, the camp's main thoroughfare. There are dozens of houses along this street; some are still standing and some, several stories high, have been demolished. IDF bulldozers leveled off the area of what remained of the buildings, creating a patchwork of open spaces.

Only a few hundred meters divide the street from an IDF lookout post on the border, above a steel fence constructed over the past few months. The most notorious of the IDF posts is the one known as Termit, south of the camp. When night falls, Termit becomes the scene of most of the exchanges of fire between the IDF and the Palestinians.

Yesterday, the bulldozers were still going about their work. Over the past four days, a bizarre situation has been created whereby the army continues its operations in the refugee camps, home to 30,000 people, while in other areas of Rafah, life goes on as usual.

Jamal Yussuf, whose house is on To'ameh Street, said IDF forces arrived at the camp after midnight on Friday, and that he gathered his family members in order to move them out. But in the chaos of the noise of the tank treads and the shooting, he forgot his son Mohammed in the house, and had to return to get him.

Practically the only public institutions still functioning in this camp are premises donated by international bodies. In preparation for the operation, the IDF commandeered them because of their good view of the surroundings. Such was the case with a child development center, a new building. Here, too, furniture was flung on the floor, firing slits were carved out of the walls, and hundreds of bullet holes riddled the outside.

Peter Hansen, UNRWA director in the Gaza Strip, said that, according to the agency's figures, some 120 Palestinian families had lost their homes as of yesterday morning, and more than 1,300 people had registered in UNRWA offices as having incurred damage from the IDF operation.

Hansen said if the tunnels and the smuggling - the reason for the operation - are a security threat, then Israel "has a case." But he added that the bigger question is whether the three tunnels the IDF reported finding justify this much damage.

So far, eight Palestinians have reportedly died during the operation, and about 80 have been injured, with 15 still hospitalized in moderate to serious condition. Two of the dead are children who undoubtedly had no connection to the IDF's struggle against the armed men in the tunnels.

At the opening stage of the operation, 8-year-old Ibrahim Krinawi was killed. Ibrahim, whose house was in the first row facing the border, was the youngest of five children. His father Ahmed said the family was in the house when the operation began. They were going to leave but the bulldozer got there before they were able to do so. He said the bulldozer began tearing down a wall of the house, and he and his children went outside to stop it. At this point, a single shot hit Ibrahim in the right side of his chest and he collapsed. His father called an ambulance. As Ibrahim's brother Ayad told it, "at the beginning, he was conscious and yelling that it was hurting him terribly and for us to save him. Then he began to bleed and he begged us to take the bullet out but we couldn't do anything." The father said a Palestinian ambulance stopped a few hundred meters from the house but could not come any closer. Finally, family members carried Ibrahim to the ambulance. An hour later, he died at a makeshift clinic.

Twelve-year-old Sami Salah was also killed during the operation in one of the alleys near Jamal Yussuf's home. Sami's uncle said his nephew was shot in the head by an IDF sharpshooter about an hour after the operation began. He died immediately.

Rafah's single high school for the sciences, a new facility, now serves as a shelter for some 150 residents made homeless by the operation. Razik Al-Abasi, also from Yabneh, lives in a building that was home to six brothers and their families, 43 people in all. "We heard the noise of the tanks and the bulldozers, and saw the projectors pointed in our direction," he said. "At a certain point, we understood that half the house had been destroyed and the other half was going to fall down, so we ran out with all the children. We looked for a place to rent but we couldn't even find a storeroom." Al-Abasi, like other residents of the camps who sought shelter at the school, are able to stay in a classroom during the night but he said "except for the clothes on our back, we have nothing, no food for the children and no schoolbags." When he returned home after the operation began he discovered that the house had been completely demolished.

Other families are being housed in various municipal buildings throughout Rafah until other quarters can be found. UNRWA sources said they will try to give $500 to each family that lost their home, but this will not help much.

Damage has also been done to the city's already failing sewage system. Phone, electricity, and water lines are totally inoperative.

Residents call the tunnels a "business," an economic endeavor for those who operate them; use of the tunnel, they say, costs about $5,000 an hour, and so the IDF operation, known as "Operation Root Canal" will not put an end to the phenomenon. The "owners" of the tunnel will try to put new ones into operation at any cost.

A number of weeks ago, Palestinian security forces announced their own operation in the wake of a suicide bomb in Jerusalem. Palestinian forces deployed in a widely advertised operation and closed off a number of tunnels, but residents say that, at any given time, there are dozens of tunnels in operation along the border with Egypt. IDF operations, they add, do more damage to the residents than they do to the tunnels.

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