RAFAH REFUGEE CAMP, Gaza Strip — It had been a week since Eyad Yousef was home and saw his family, which was hemmed in, along with the rest of the neighborhood, behind a cordon of Israeli tanks and soldiers.
Yousef made it home Monday, after the soldiers pulled away, ending the six-day siege. The 32-year-old was greeted by flattened greenhouses, torn-up streets and a number of smashed buildings.
"It looks very black," Yousef said in the Tel Sultan neighborhood, where Israeli forces began their incursion into the Rafah refugee camp last Tuesday. "The picture for me is very black."
That sadness was common in the crowded neighborhood of about 25,000 people as visitors entered for the first time since Israel sealed off Tel Sultan. Israel's move was part of an operation that it said was aimed at finding Palestinian militants and weapons-smuggling tunnels.
By Monday night, Israeli troops had left the last two neighborhoods in Rafah, but it was not clear if that ended the incursion, called Operation Rainbow.
More than 40 Palestinians were killed and dozens injured during the offensive, which drew sharp criticism from abroad. There were no Israeli casualties.
Left behind in Tel Sultan were empty tracts and the splintered remains of greenhouses that had formerly covered the agricultural areas. Trenches gouged the streets, leaving pools of raw sewage. Dozens of buildings appeared to have been damaged by bulldozers and tanks, or pockmarked by the shooting.
Open-sided mourning tents popped up as relatives were for the first time able to bury the dead, some stored in a makeshift morgue since last week. The streets of Tel Sultan were clogged with thousands of mourners as families held funerals for 16 people killed during the violence.
On one street corner, residents pointed to where they said three Palestinian men were killed in separate shootings.
"Because of the heavy shooting, we didn't understand what was going on," said Mahmoud Shalayel, 69, standing next to a tent erected in honor of a neighbor, a 24-year-old Palestinian police officer. "There was shooting on all sides."
The tight seal around the neighborhood and constant gunfire in the narrow streets left many residents cowering inside their homes for days without electricity or running water, they said.
By Monday, the water was just a trickle and most of the area still lacked electricity and telephone service.
