Gaza City  - As a tenuous ceasefire takes hold ending three weeks of fighting in the Gaza Strip, and foreign journalists begin trickling into the salient, allegations are emerging indicating that Israeli troops may have committed war crimes.

Many of the 1,415 Palestinian dead in Gaza were civilians, and although their exact numbers are difficult to ascertain, women and minors are reported to make up some 40 per cent of the total toll.

Even during the fighting, accounts surfaced of many members of a single family being wiped out by Israeli shelling or Israeli airstrikes, and United Nations facilities, where civilians had taken shelter, were also fired on by Israeli ground troops.

But the most complete claim of alleged Israeli atrocities only surfaced when journalists were able to visit rubble-strewn Zeitoun.

Dozens of bodies, including women, children, and elderly, have been pulled out the debris of this Gaza City neighbourhood, and more corpses are thought to be still buried under the rubble.

Zinad Samouni says that she and 18 other people from her family were huddling together in one room in her house on January 4, taking shelter from the shooting outside.

"We were terrified as shells hit the roof and other parts of the house but we thought we were lucky because they did not hit our room," she says.

At around 6:30 am, they heard solders banging on the door.

Zinad's husband, Atiyeh, "went to the door with his hands raised holding his ID but they shot him in the doorway and he fell forward."

Although another family member starting yelling "children, children" in Hebrew, the soldiers opened fire, and Zinad's son Ahmed was shot two times, while his sister Amal took a bullet in the head. She is still in hospital, but Ahmed died in his mother's arms.

Atiyeh's body was left to decompose for almost two weeks, according to the claims, while Israeli soldiers took up positions in an adjacent four-storey house which they used as an observation post.

Additional accounts of the alleged atrocities in Zeitoun say soldiers herded around 110 other members of the Samouni family into a large house, which was then shelled. At least 30 bodies were recovered from the flattened building.

Ambulance crews, who say they were fired on when they tried to collect bodies, have extracted at least 48 corpses from Zeitoun.

Soldiers also scrawled graffiti in one house in the neighbourhood, including the phrases "Arabs need 2 die" and "1 is down, 999,999 to go" in English.

The Israeli army said Tuesday afternoon that it was investigating the allegations regarding Zeitoun.

Israel has argued that many of the civilian deaths in the Gaza fighting are due to Hamas fighters having opened fire on Israeli troops, or launched rockets, while surrounded by civilians.

Israeli military officials also argue that many Hamas fighters shed their uniforms while taking on the Israelis, with the result that those who were killed are numbered among civilian casualties.

Nonetheless, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who said he was "deeply grieved" at what he saw during a visit to the Gaza Strip Tuesday, called for a "full investigation" into civilian deaths in the fighting.

A previous independent investigation, into claims of a massacre in the West Bank city of Jenin in April 2002, later found that instead of the hundreds of Palestinian civilians claimed to have been killed by Israeli troops, the actual toll was 56 Palestinians, most of them combatants, and 23 Israeli soldiers.

It was unclear however whether Israel would cooperate with an independent investigation into the events in the Gaza Strip in the just-ended fighting, or to what extent.

"So long as the authoritarian Hamas regime rules the Gaza Strip though terror and civilians have to think very carefully about saying anything critical of Hamas, the question must be asked, how does one really conduct a true and fair investigation," Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev said. dpa