UNEMPLOYED and desperate, the only crime committed by the five young Palestinians was to take an illegal route into Israel to find illicit jobs. They paid with their lives.

As the unarmed jobseekers crawled towards the fence sealing off Gaza from the rest of the world they were killed by an Israeli tank shell packed with winged darts and shrapnel that lacerated their flesh. For more than 24 hours their bodies were left in the sun near Gaza’s Karni crossing until an ambulance was finally allowed to pick them up.

Israel has regretted the deaths, acknowledging that none of the men was a terrorist. The Times has also learnt that Israeli commanders are investigating why the soldiers opened fire, and why they used a tank shell that inflicted such massive injuries.

Amid emotional scenes Muhammad and Asaf el Astal and their three cousins, aged 19 to 35, were buried yesterday in their home town of Khan Younis. They were mourned by pregnant wives and children whose poverty they had tried to alleviate by sneaking across the frontier with Israel, dragging two ladders to scale the heavily fortified fence.

At the bare breezeblock house where 35 members of Muhammad’s family depended on the 19-year-old labourer and his father to support them, relatives squeezed into a dusty room where the bodies were laid out in white sheets, arms folded across their chests.

“I used to tell him not to go. I had a feeling he wouldn’t come back this time,” cried Doa, the pregnant 16-year-old widow of Muhammad Fahmi.

“My husband did tell me he was going, but he left his identity card behind,” wept Muhammad Adel’s wife Sanaa. “He had many debts. One was for the meat served at our wedding two years ago.”

An Israeli army spokesman said that the soldiers opened fire because the group was approaching a prohibited area at night where the military had been tipped off that a terrorist cell was about to infiltrate.

None of the men was a gunman. That was clear from the funeral. There was not a flag in sight and the procession of weeping mourners was ignored by thousands of Hamas supporters streaming in the opposite direction for a rally to mark the group’s 15th anniversary.

Gaza has been reduced to dire straits economically since Israel sealed the crossings to Palestinian workers when the intifada broke out in September 2000.

The United Nations puts the poverty rate at 70 per cent in Gaza and unemployment at 50 per cent. It says that 20 per cent of Palestinian households have lost all their income. The World Bank estimates that 80,000 Palestinians have lost their jobs in Israel and Jewish settlements, and a further 60,000 in Palestinian areas.

Friends of the dead men yesterday told how desperation drove them to risk death for 150 shekels (£21) a day as illegal construction workers in Israel. One 21-year-old who previously crossed with two of the victims said that the route was well-known but risked by few. Crossings at Karni were made at night because trees on the Israeli side provided good cover.

“We wait until the Israelis change the guard and then go. It has to be arranged in advance and there is always somebody waiting on the other side with a car,” he said.

The car is provided by a middle man who takes £150 per worker in cash, in advance, then spirits them to Arab villages within Israel. There they live and work furtively for Jewish or Arab businessmen for a few weeks to a year, transferring the money back home and always fearing discovery by Israeli police.

Exploited by employers paying half the salaries of legal workers, the risks are enormous and the conditions awful. For two months the 21-year-old slept outside in an orchard, even during rainstorms.

The rewards are also uncertain. “I worked two or three days a week for five months, then someone stole something from my employer. He called the police and we all ran, leaving my clothes, all my money and everything,” he said. “We lost 2,000 shekels (£300) each.

Israel insists that the closures and blockades will remain in place as long as gunmen and suicide bombers try to attack Israeli towns and cities.

“This is an unfortunate and tragic event — so typical of this terrible conflict,” said Jonathan Peled, a Foreign Ministry spokesman. “Unfortunately these five people came along suspiciously at night, crawling toward a fence and were killed even though they were not terrorists.”

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