RAFAH: In Israel's offensive here against Palestinian militant fighters, army tanks and bulldozers controlled the neighbourhood called Brazil for a day and a half. When they pulled back on Friday morning, it looked as though they had unleashed some giant monster that had eaten a swath through the city.

Brazil is technically part of the Rafah Refugee Camp, established for Palestinians after Israel's founding in 1948 and named for Brazilian troops who patrolled here under a United Nations mandate in the 1950s. But it hardened long ago into a dense, chaotic neighbourhood of concrete-block homes and shops.

In a dumbfounding display of power, Israeli bulldozers had cut a 20- to 30-foot-wide path through more than a mile of the city. At Nile Street, about 300 yards north of the fortified wall that marks the Israeli-controlled zone on the border between Gaza and Egypt, the bulldozers plowed up the asphalt, digging a dirt ravine. They piled dirt, broken asphalt and concrete, tree trunks and utility poles into berms that blocked side streets. Other mounds of debris were shoved through storefronts.

"They came about 9pm on Wednesday," said Adnan Khalaf, 44, whose stationery store was caved in. After bulldozers, guarded by tanks and troops, plowed overnight, "a tank came with a loudspeaker on Thursday morning and said all men, ages 16 to 60, had to come out onto the street or their houses would be destroyed."

Khalaf and others said troops marched the men to the fortified wall at the neighbourhood's southern edge that marks the Israeli- controlled border between Gaza and Egypt. After a day of questioning, "all the men from my area were released," Khalaf said, although residents said some men had been detained.

Israel says it attacked Rafah to eliminate Palestinian militants and the tunnels they use to smuggle in guns from Egypt. Israeli officials said on Friday the operation had found no new tunnels and would continue.

Palestinian officials said the Israeli bulldozers destroyed 25 houses in their 36 hours in Brazil and said more than 40 total have been destroyed in Rafah. Some were apartment buildings, and it was unclear on Friday how many families had lost their homes.

The raid on Rafah is Israel's biggest attack in Gaza in years and came days after militants here killed 13 Israeli troops in heavy fighting. Khalaf and other residents said the assault is a collective punishment for the soldiers' deaths. The army scattered fliers telling residents they should hinder "terrorists" from operating in their neighbourhoods.

Israel denies its army committed any pattern of destruction. A spokeswoman, Capt Sharon Feingold, said troops had demolished only five houses, doing so after militants had hid in them to fire on Israeli troops. Other destruction here, Feingold said, may have been caused by bombs set off by militants, or in the course of firefights.

But it was the army bulldozers that had cut a sorrowful new road through Brazil, paved with the shreds of people's homes and lives ground into the dirt: shredded carpets and mattresses, shards of tin roofing, a child's flattened soccer ball.

The road led to the Qishta family farm - a grove of olive trees and date palms that had been an oasis amid the densely packed apartment buildings. On Friday, it was a moonscape of brown dirt suffused with the astringent, woody smell of freshly butchered trees.

"Seven tanks and two bulldozers... came here about 1am," said Hamidan Qishta, 53. They stayed for more than 24 hours, plowing under at least 320 trees, a sheep pen and chicken coop. -Dawn/The LAT-WP News Service (c) Newsday.