AL QUDS, May 23: A senior cabinet member touched a sensitive nerve in Israel on Sunday by appearing to compare its destruction of Palestinian homes in Rafah refugee camp to Nazi atrocities against Jews during the Holocaust.

Justice Minister Yosef Lapid, a Holocaust survivor, called in a cabinet meeting for an end to the demolitions, describing such a policy as inhumane and liable to lead to war crimes charges against Israel in the International Court of Justice.

"I saw on television an old woman picking through the rubble of her house in Rafah, looking for her medicine, and she reminded me of my grandmother who was expelled from her home during the Holocaust," political sources quoted him as saying.

Israeli armour and infantry pushed into the camp on Tuesday in what the army described as a search for tunnels used to smuggle weapons from nearby Egypt. The operation, in which 42 Palestinians have been killed and hundreds made homeless, has drawn international criticism, including from Israel's main ally, the United States.

Rafah residents say Israeli forces have destroyed some 35 homes and damaged dozens. The army said it razed five homes and others were destroyed or damaged during battles with militants.

In the West Bank city of Nablus, two Hamas fighters were killed when an explosive device they were transporting on a cart detonated accidentally, witnesses said.

At the cabinet session, an angry Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told Lapid, leader of the centrist Shinui party and his main partner in the governing coalition, that his remarks were "unacceptable and intolerable", the sources said.

Speaking later on Israel Radio, Lapid acknowledged that his criticism of the raid - the strongest voiced by a government member - "had raised all sort of associations" at the cabinet session.

"To remove any doubt, I said that I didn't mean the Germans or the Holocaust, but when you see an old woman, you think of your own grandmother," he told the radio. Lapid's grandmother perished in the gas chambers at Auschwitz death camp.

BAD ANALOGY: Health Minister Danny Naveh of Sharon's right-wing Likud party, said on the radio Lapid "can argue about demolishing houses...but you can't draw these kinds of analogies".