Rafah, Gaza Strip ? In Israel’s offensive here against Palestinian militant fighters, army tanks and bulldozers controlled the neighborhood called Brazil for a day and a half. When they pulled back 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 neighborhood of concrete-block homes and shops.

In a 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 9 p.m. 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 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 neighborhood’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 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 had been destroyed in Rafah.

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.

Palestinian Bidoor Masri clutches a teddy bear as she stands with belongings in front of her family's destroyed house in the Brazil section of the Rafah refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip. Israeli troops pulled back from two neighborhoods in this sprawling Palestinian refugee camp Friday, leaving behind dozens of demolished and damaged homes, torn-up roads and flattened cars.