THE US issued a rare rebuke to Israel last night after at least ten Palestinians, including children, were killed and more than fifty wounded when a tank fired into a crowd of unarmed demonstrators.

“It is a tragic incident,” Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, said. “I believe the activities of the Israeli Defence Forces in Gaza in recent days have caused a problem and have worsened the situation and I think made it more difficult for us to move forward and get back into the peace process.”

In another sign of the Bush Administration’s displeasure at Israel, the US abstained in a vote on a UN Security Council resolution condemning the killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. The resolution, also calling on Israel to stop the demolition of houses at the Rafah refugee camp, was carried unopposed.

The latest violence erupted as a crowd of more than a thousand Palestinians, with schoolchildren in the lead, headed for Tel al-Sultan, an area of Rafah in the Gaza Strip that is sealed off from the rest of the town. Witnesses said they were raked with machinegun and sniper fire before a tank shell landed in the midst of the front ranks.

Two more tank rounds followed in quick succession as an Apache helicopter surveyed the scene from above. Those who fled, their clothes smeared with blood of the dead and dying, said that many of the fatally injured were decapitated or torn apart.

The steps to Rafah’s tiny 40-bed hospital ran with the blood of the wounded after they were ferried across town in ambulances, taxis with their doors open to accommodate the prostrate victims and even donkey carts. Three of the dead were aged below 18.

Crowds of anxious parents besieged the hospital’s gates desperate for news of their children. But after blocking roads to Rafah for three days the Israeli military allowed ambulances carrying the wounded to travel to Gaza, Khan Younis and the nearby Jewish settlement of Morag.

The Israeli Army expressed sorrow over the “very grave” incident, but denied that it had targeted the crowd.

It said the Apache helicopter hovering above had fired a missile into a deserted area as a warning. But as the crowd, which the army said had gunmen among it, continued to advance, the tank had fired its machinegun at an empty building, followed by four shells at the structure.

“It is possible that the casualties were a result of the tank fire on the abandoned structure,” the statement added. “The details of the incident continue to be investigated.”

The deadly strike ratcheted up feelings in an already tense situation after Israeli troops conducting house-to-house searches in Tel al-Sultan killed twenty people on Tuesday, most of them civilians.

In the morning five dead, two of them teenage boys, were taken to the hospital amid a steady stream of wounded. Thirty-one people have died since the incursion into Rafah began.

Witnesses among the protesters, who denied there were gunmen in their ranks, said they had been marching along Beach Road in Rafah, which runs parallel to the Egyptian border on the periphery of the refugee camp.

Incensed by the worsening conditions inside Tel al-Sultan the protesters had answered calls from mosque loudspeakers to vent their fury. They were also angry about an Israeli round-up of all males over 16, about 2,000 in total, who were ordered to report to the local al-Maria school.

A line of ambulances, which had all morning taken the dead and wounded from Israeli sniper attacks to hospital, straddled the road. The cordon marked the point beyond which the Israeli curfew of the area began.

But as the front rows of marchers, chanting “Allahu akbar” (God is greatest) reached the ambulances, they heard the tank open up with its machinegun. The first shell landed in the midst of the crowd, followed by several more rounds moments later.

“We’d gone to protest because the people of Tel al-Sultan have no food, no water,” said Mardi Mahadi Abu Hassna, 22, who was four rows from the front and saw a friend, Ala Sheikh Eid, killed before him. “We’d heard people were being rounded up.”

Saleh Ahmed, 37, another protester, said: “It was a peaceful demonstration. There were no armed people. The atmosphere encouraged the children, especially the very young, to go to the front. The first shell did most damage. We were all knocked to the ground.

“I saw people torn to pieces. Six had their heads cut off by the blast. Others had lost arms and legs. Most were children.”

Among the children killed yesterday was Saber Abu Libdeh, 13, shot in the back when he ventured out of his home in search of water after the family’s tank ran dry during a power cut.

The Israeli Army says this latest incursion into the Gaza Strip, one of the biggest for several years, is to search for tunnels used to smuggle weapons across the border from Egypt.

Tony Blair issued a strong condemnation of Israel’s military actions in Gaza over recent days. He said: “We entirely understand the concerns of Israel about acts of terrorism, but what happened (yesterday) was unacceptable and wrong.”

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