Gaza Hospitals Turned Into Battlefields

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www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,2101671,00.html

With snipers on their rooftops and doctors and nurses afraid to come to work, Gaza’s hospitals are finding themselves on the frontline in the Palestinians’ increasingly bloody internal fight.

Of the territory’s eight hospitals, one closed after three people were killed there. The rest are understaffed and harassed by militants as casualties pour in.

Gunmen from the rival Fatah and Hamas movements are engaged in a battle for power that has left more than 80 dead and hundreds wounded in Gaza in the past month. “We ourselves are not secure. How can we look after the lives of others?” said Ayed al-Wahidi, a doctor at Shifa hospital, Gaza’s largest medical centre. While fighting raged in the grounds on Monday, the hospital sent an ambulance to pick up a trauma specialist, but the ambulance came under fire, Dr Wahidi said. The doctor made it. But other doctors and nurses have not been able to get to work.

Wessam Awadallah, another doctor at Shifa, said the hospital needed 50 doctors; yesterday they had 20. Masked men have been roaming the hospital, occasionally fighting. “We don’t know who they are or who they are fighting,” Dr Awadallah said. “There will come a moment when we will not be able to treat anyone, and let them die.”

Hamas-affiliated security guards used the roof of the European hospital in Khan Yunis to launch an assault on a nearby Fatah position yesterday, said head of nursing Atta al-Jaabari. The assault caused panic among staff, some of whom had children at a kindergarten on site, but doctors treated three of the wounded as the battle continued.

The hospital sent home all non-essential staff and patients whose lives were not in danger. The doctors and nurses remained. “We can’t go. Who would we leave the sick people to?” al-Jaabari said.

The hospital in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun shut down entirely after three people were shot dead inside on Monday, medical officials said. The International Committee of the Red Cross demanded that the groups take the fighting out of hospitals.

Unable to take control of the streets, the Palestinian authority, nominally run by a Fatah-Hamas coalition, could only call for restraint. Anan Masri, deputy health minister, asked militants to “stay away from the health departments that are serving all the citizens”.

Gaza Hospitals Turned Into Battlefields

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