Several hundred mourners chanting "Bomb Tel Aviv!" bore the five sisters' bodies to the camp's cemetery, wrapped in green Hamas flags.
The grieving Balousha said he had no sympathy for the hundreds of thousands of Israeli civilians within range of Hamas' rockets.
"Let them first feel the pain of our revenge, then come ask me whether I feel sorry for them," he said in response to a reporter's question. "There is a consensus in their public opinion to kill us. No one spoke a word to stop their aggressive assaults against us."
Around the time of the funeral in Gaza, cellphones began ringing in southern Israel, in the adjacent Bedouin communities of Aroer and Rahat. Members of the construction crew in Ashkelon were calling home to report the missile strike.
"There was panic and confusion," said Khaled Latif, a 37-year-old businessman who received one of the calls. "They were saying one worker was dead, but at first we didn't know who."
Hamas' military wing claimed responsibility for the attack. "The Zionist enemy admitted the death of a Zionist and the wounding of others," a Hamas statement said.
Surviving members of the crew, all Israeli Arabs, took offense. "These are painful words," said a worker who identified himself only as Osman. "It doesn't matter if we're Jews or Arabs. We all need to live."
The construction crew had a fortified shelter on the second floor of the unfinished building, where they were working when the air raid siren went off. But rather than duck into the shelter, Osman said, they were heading downstairs when the missile hit.
Mahdi was the first person killed by a Hamas strike on Ashkelon, which has been hit 14 times since Saturday. The city of 120,000 people north of the Gaza border first became a target early this year when Hamas began to upgrade its arsenal of crude rockets, expanding their range.
"It was frightening. I was shivering," Andrey Bokti, a 17-year-old Israeli, wrote on his blog after witnessing Monday's attack. He described the scene as others in the city took cover. "The streets are empty, the city is empty, the malls are closed. . . . Fear and terror. But in war, we need to stay strong."
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boudreaux@latimes.com
Burai is a special correspondent. Times staff writer Geraldine Baum at the United Nations contributed to this report.
