BUREIJ REFUGEE CAMP, Gaza Strip - The Israeli army had clear goals for its attack here yesterday: Hunt down a fugitive Palestinian militant and blow up his house. But nothing is straightforward in this camp's tangle of alleys.

Palestinians armed with machine guns and hand grenades tried for three hours to stave off the soldiers' attack, which was backed by two dozen tanks and an Apache helicopter. In the end, 10 Palestinians were killed, and the army pulled out after destroying the two-story home it had targeted but without capturing the man it sought.

It was difficult to determine how many of the dead, nine of them men and all between 20 and 35, were gunmen. The army said that most of those killed were armed and that at least five were militants with the radical Hamas group. Palestinian doctors said several civilians were among the dead, including two United Nations school workers.

Later yesterday, a mass funeral procession wound its way along the streets of this camp of about 30,000 people. The bodies were held aloft as militants, their faces covered with black ski masks, fired guns into the air and vowed revenge.

Hardly a tear was shed, and that seemed another product of the long, violent conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Aisha Bahar, 60, sat on the cold stone floor of her one-room house, its makeshift roof a piece of corrugated tin. She last saw her 30-year-old son, Abdel Menem Bahar, as he raced outside and into the battle, where he met his death.

"I said, 'Thank God my son is a martyr,'" Bahar recalled. She said Abdel, a street vendor, was simply curious about what was happening.

The dead man's wife, Rola Bahar, 29, cradled their newborn daughter and gazed at her three young sons. "I am proud of him, and I hope that my sons will follow their father," she said.

Yesterday's Israeli army operation was typical of its tactics in Gaza. Israel has long threatened to reoccupy Gaza, a stronghold for competing militant groups, but the army has instead resorted to quick strikes, actions that have sometimes caused a high death toll, highlighting the dangers of engaging in house-to-house combat in densely populated areas.

In a statement, the Israeli army said soldiers were searching for Aiman Shasniyeh, the leader of the Popular Resistance Committee, an umbrella group for several militant organizations that the military believes planted a bomb that destroyed a tank and killed three soldiers in March.

On Wednesday, missiles fired from a helicopter into a Palestinian police post in Gaza killed Mustafa Sabah, who Israeli officials said designed and built the bomb that disabled the tank, which the army once considered nearly invincible.

Yesterday's battle started when soldiers approached Shasniyeh's two-story house. The army said troops encountered "massive fire from close range" that included grenades and at least one anti-tank missile.

Palestinian gunmen who had been celebrating the end of Ramadan poured from their homes, encouraged by announcements from mosque loudspeakers. Gunbattles raged off and on for about three hours.

Among the dead were two employees of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which provides humanitarian assistance in the refugee camps. The two were identified as Osama Hassan Tahrawi, a 31-year-old janitor, and Ahlam Riziq Kandil, a 31-year-old elementary school teacher.

Israeli army officers said they regretted any loss of civilian life but defended their attack, saying in a statement that they used firepower that was "necessary to protect our forces operating in the area. This is a place that Palestinian security forces ignored and allowed a terrorist infrastructure to develop."

An army spokesman said that during one especially fierce gunfight, a helicopter fired a single missile into a group of five armed Hamas men, killing them. Palestinians said several civilians were killed in that strike.

Soldiers did not locate Shasniyeh but destroyed his house. The wanted man's brother, Mohammed, 22, said he was watching television when soldiers detonated explosives to blast down the front door before reducing the house to a 15-foot-high pile of rubble.

Next door, Abdul Rahman Ibrahim, 52, said he cowered under his bedcovers with his wife and children as shock waves from the explosives knocked down shelves in his house. Outside, his yellow Mercedes taxi was dented and pockmarked by bullets.

"I was just thinking that I had to survive," Ibrahim said. "I wasn't scared. There was no way to move from the house. The Israelis were everywhere. I don't know what I am going to do now. My car is gone, and that was my only source of income. I'm an old man. There is nothing else I can do."