HAN YUNIS, Gaza Strip, Dec. 13 — The five cousins left their identification as Gaza Palestinians at home. They dressed in layers because of the winter wind, and because the clothes on their backs would be their only wardrobe during the weeks or months they planned to stay in Israel, working illegally.

After dark Wednesday, they took a ladder, guessed when the army patrols were looking elsewhere, and stole toward the Israeli fence that encloses the Gaza Strip.

"I used to tell him not to go," said Doa al-Astal, whose husband, Muhammad Fahmi al-Astal, 21, was in the group. "I had a feeling he wouldn't come back this time." Weeping, she held their year-old girl, Shaimah.

The cousins' mangled bodies were returned today to this struggling town in southern Gaza. The army said that soldiers, operating on intelligence that predicted a terrorist infiltration, opened fire with tanks when they detected shadowy figures crawling toward the fence.

When soldiers examined the bodies Thursday morning, they found two 13-foot ladders nearby but no weapons. Today the Israeli government conceded that the men might have been seeking to work in Israel.

"It's a strange incident, and if they were workers, an unhappy one," said Jacob Dallal, an army spokesman. "It's incredibly dangerous, what they did. There have been many attempts at that point to infiltrate by people who clearly wanted to carry out terror attacks."

The cousins, all Astal family members, were well aware of the risks, their relatives said. But two had pregnant wives, and others already had children. One was trying to pay off debts, including money owed for the meat served at his wedding two years ago. Another was one of only two breadwinners in a household of at least 30.

"They had lost any hope of getting work inside the Gaza Strip," said another cousin, Raed al-Astal. "There was no food for the children."

Some of them, including Muhammad al-Astal, had followed this dangerous route before, eluding patrols on both sides as they climbed over the electrified warning fence to meet an Israeli fixer. They melted into Israel's Arab minority population to work in construction or other menial jobs for perhaps $12 to $20 a day — half the wages of legal Palestinian workers. They wired the money home and, when they felt they had made enough — or missed their families too much, or wearied of living as fugitives — they returned to the Gaza boundary and handed themselves in to Israeli soldiers, who eventually expelled them back to their homes.

Crying to see their loved ones, family members pounded on the steel door of the morgue of Nasser hospital here today. As the blows echoed inside the cramped room, in a stench of blood, workers prepared Muhammad al-Astal's body for burial. His right arm was ripped away and his abdomen had been torn to shreds. They wrapped him in a white sheet, tied the bundle with strips of another sheet, and then scribbled his identification on it.

Then they moved on to the next body, that of Assaf al-Astal, 20. They cut through his three shirts, and opened his two pairs of pants.

One hospital worker held three cheap digital watches taken from the bodies of the dead. He later gave them to a member of the family.

Outside, Dr. Haidr al-Qidra, manager of the hospital, held up an inch-long dart — like a nail with fins — that he said had been pulled from one of the bodies. In keeping with its practice, the army declined to discuss the weapons it used. Israeli and foreign rights groups have repeatedly criticized Israel for using shells packed with thousands of these darts, called fléchettes, during the conflict with the Palestinians.

"Their wounds were distributed all over their bodies," Dr. Qidra said. "There were big holes."

In a conflict that has proved endlessly inventive when it comes to human suffering, the impact on Gaza is perhaps best illustrated by the new form of work discovered by little boys here.

They cluster by the side of the main north-south road. If a passing driver has only one or two passengers, he picks up a boy and carries him past the Israeli machine-gun post at the checkpoint that cuts the road. The soldiers, seeing the child, are reassured that the driver is not a suicide bomber. The boy makes one shekel, or about 22 cents.

The United Nations reported last summer that about 70 percent of Gaza's million Palestinians now live below the poverty level, defined as $2 worth of consumption daily. Forty-two percent of Gazans are entirely dependent on some form of food assistance. Gaza's private sector is about half the size it was before the conflict began, in October 2000.

The highest-paying jobs for Gazans have always been in Israel, which occupied Gaza and the West Bank during the 1967 war. Before this conflict, some 30,000 Gazans worked across the boundary. That number was cut to 2,000 to 4,000 after the conflict began. But Israel recently began issuing more permits, and the number has climbed to 14,000.

No one knows how many more make it over the fence, which is 30 miles long and brackets Gaza against the Mediterranean, where Israeli naval patrols impose strict limits on Palestinian fishermen. The fence was built in 1994 and substantially upgraded during the conflict.

To scale it "takes a lot of guts," said one 21-year-old man here. He and another man said those who decide to try it agree to pay more than $200 to Israeli contacts — Jews and Arabs — who will meet them on the other side.

In groups of three, four or five, they leave about 11 p.m. They study the Israeli patrols, and make their move when the guard is being changed, hurrying across more than a mile of barren no man's land toward the fence, at a point where thick forest grows close to the other side.

The 21-year-old said that although he had not worked a single day since the conflict began, he was not willing to run the heightened risks of crossing the fence.

Before the conflict, he said, he spent five months illegally working in Israel, and it was not a pleasant experience. For two months he slept in an orchard. He worked as a plasterer two or three days a week in Tel Aviv, he said, but he lost four months' wages — more than $400 — after someone stole from the Israeli boss; the whole group had to flee when the boss called the police.

That group, he said, included two of those killed near the Karni border crossing on Wednesday.

When the morgue released the bodies today, the Astal clan claimed its dead. Through muddy streets smelling of sewage, about 200 people tramped after the five white bundles. Sometimes the crowd chanted that God is great.

A year ago, five boys from the same large clan, aged 6 to 14, were blown up by a planted Israeli explosive as they walked to school. The army said it was an accident, explaining that the intended targets were gunmen who frequently attacked a nearby Israeli settlement.

In the procession today, three people carried small Palestinian flags, and a couple of men fired guns, but no posters from any militant groups were seen. None of the professional rabble-rousers were heard, either, leading the familiar chants for bloody vengeance with their ear-splitting megaphones. The family did not speak of revenge, but instead of its dead being in God's hands.

"Be satisfied with what you have," read an Arabic proverb scrawled on the doors of the unfinished house where they carried the five bodies. "That is its own reward."

Just a few blocks away, the fundamentalist group Hamas marked its 15th anniversary today with a rally that drew tens of thousands. Men in white robes and mock explosive belts appeared before the cheering throng, promising to sustain the Hamas campaign of suicide bombing. Masked gunmen showed off the crude rockets that Hamas has taken to firing at Israelis over the Gaza fence. Hamas swore to play its part in the spiral of violence by avenging the killing of the five laborers.

But none of the Hamas supporters rushed to join the Astal clan in its sad gathering.

The three other dead men were Ahmed Muhammad al-Astal, 31; Ahmed Fares al-Astal, 19; and Muhammad Adel al-Astal, 25, the brother of Assaf.