RAFAH, May 23: On a blood-stained floor in a makeshift morgue in Rafah, the bodies of 16 Palestinians killed in Israel's bloodiest Gaza Strip raid in years lie in white shrouds, waiting to be buried.

The morgue has held some bodies for nearly a week because family members, sealed off by Israeli tanks in Rafah's Tel al-Sultan neighbourhood, have been unable to collect them.

"These two are brothers," a morgue worker said on Sunday as he held open the heavy metal door of a produce freezer that normally holds vegetables and flowers. "They died in the first day of the siege." That was on Tuesday.

The UN agency for Palestinian refugees UNRWA has urged Israel to give relatives permission to leave Tel al-Sultan for the burials. But so far the families have been unable to do so.

An Israeli army spokesman said the army had authorised buses to take relatives of the dead from Tel al-Sultan to Rafah, but did not know when that might happen.

Israeli troops have killed 42 Palestinians since the raid, which has drawn international criticism, began on Tuesday. More than 1,600 people have been made homeless. Rafah residents say Israeli forces have destroyed some 35 homes and damaged dozens, while the Israeli army says it razed five homes and that others were wrecked or damaged during battles with militants.

Israel launched the incursion, its largest in Gaza in years, to search for tunnels used to smuggle in weapons from neighbouring Egypt, after 13 Israeli soldiers were killed in the space of a week and a separate attack claimed the life of a settler woman and her four children in Gaza. -Reuters