Israel’s Strategy Of Dividing the Strip Hinders Relief Efforts
By Sudarsan Raghavan and Reyham Abdel Kareem
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, January 6, 2009; A09
JERUSALEM, Jan. 5 — Mohammed Alwan applied pressure to the wounds of the young man in a corridor of Gaza City’s Shifa Hospital on Monday. Blood flowing from his body turned the surgeon’s gloved hands crimson.
“Khalas,” a voice said, Arabic for “It’s over.”
The doctor refused to give up. He pumped the man’s chest, hoping to resuscitate him. A few minutes later, the man died.
“What can I say?” he said in a fatigued voice. “I have seen this scene many times. I’ve been here four days straight and I’ve yet to go home.”
As Israeli tanks and infantry push deeper into Gaza, an already dire humanitarian situation has worsened. The Israeli government has imposed what Palestinians call a siege on the coastal strip — restricting deliveries of food, medicine and other staples — since Hamas took Gaza by force from the rival Fatah party in June 2007. On Monday, Israel’s military strategy of dividing the strip in two further hampered Gazans ability to reach hospitals and relief efforts.
The air assaults and ground clashes have paralyzed much of what makes the strip of 1.5 million people work — hospitals, water and power systems, markets and roads.
About 550 Palestinians have been killed and more than 2,500 have been reported wounded in the 10-day offensive; Palestinian health officials estimate that many of them — between 24 and 30 percent — are women and children. Most are at Shifa, Gaza’s largest hospital.
Doctors there are working day and night on floors soaked with blood to help the rapidly mounting numbers of wounded. In the halls and corridors, screams and uncontrolled sobbing, along with the sounds of bombs and mortars, punctuate conversations.
“The numbers of killed and wounded are rising. Every minute we have a bombardment,” said Hassan Khalaf, the director of Shifa Hospital. “The number of cases is overwhelming us. No hospital in the world can handle this.”
It’s become too dangerous for his staff to retrieve victims. Eleven members of his medical staff have been killed since the offensive began. “They were in ambulances,” Khalaf said.
For the past three days, there has been no electricity. The hospital’s emergency generators have been working around the clock. Even before then, when electricity was sporadic, the generators were working 16-hour-days. The hospital, he said, has only two days of fuel left.
“Electricity and communications are down over much of the strip both on account of lack of fuel and damage to critical infrastructure,” said Maxwell Gaylard, the United Nations‘ humanitarian coordinator for the Palestinian territories. “Over a million people are currently without power, and over a quarter million without running water, some for up to six days.”
Khalaf said there are also shortages of medicines, medical tools, nitrogen for anesthesia, monitors — nearly every item imaginable. Many essential staff members, especially nurses, have been unable to come to work, cut off by the fighting, Israeli tank positions and fear.
“Those in the middle of Gaza Strip could not come to work because the Israeli tanks have cut the strip into two pieces,” Khalaf said.
Fawzi Nabulsia, the head of the hospital’s intensive care unit, said he hasn’t worked since the ground invasion began Saturday. He lives south of Gaza City near the former Israeli settlement of Nitzarim. Israeli forces are now in the area, blocking the road between his house and Gaza City, Nabulsia said.
“Maybe you can speak with the Israelis and ask them to allow me to go to hospital,” he said over the telephone, his voice tinged with desperation. “We are in crisis.”
Khalaf said hospital staffers who live north of the city, where some of the heaviest fighting and attacks have unfolded, are too fearful to leave their homes. “Moving along Gaza’s streets is dangerous,” he said.
Inside Shifa Hospital on Monday, its doctors struggled to cope. Imad Majdalawi had handled 20 operations in 24 hours. In virtually every case, he had to fix broken bones, treat burns and cuts, and stop bleeding. “The worse thing I saw was the burns,” he said.
In one case, he wanted to send a patient who lost one of his eyes in an Israeli bombing to an eye hospital. But his request was turned down: the generator for the surgical theater in the hospital was needed to fuel the emergency room.
On Monday, he was treating Ghadeer, a 14-year-old girl whose hands were covered in gauze. Blood seeped through it. She was crying and shaking. Her mother and four brothers had been killed an airstrike. She didn’t know this.
“I am cold. I can’t move,” Ghadeer moaned.
Majdalawi soothed her. “Don’t worry Ghadeer. Everything will be fine.”
But there was no anesthesia or even the appropriate scissors and thread to help Ghadeer. “We are leaving patients in pain,” Majdalawi said.
A neurosurgeon, Rami al-Sousi, was engaged in a delicate operation to pull shrapnel from 5-year-old Salim al-Ar’s head. The boy would survive. Sousi has two small children but he hasn’t seen much of them in the past three days. Ninety percent of the patients he treated were civilians, he said.
“Yes, I’m tired. But I forget everything when I save lives,” Sousi said.
Abdel Kareem reported from Gaza City.
Peace and Justice Post 
Gaza’s day of carnage – 40 dead as Israelis bomb two UN schools
January 7, 2009• Bloodiest attack of campaign so far
• Obama breaks silence on conflict
A wounded Palestinian is carried near a United Nations school in Jabalya in the northern Gaza Strip. Photograph: STR/Reuters
Israel’s assault on Gaza has exacted the bloodiest toll of civilian lives yet, when the bombing of UN schools being used as refugee centres and of housing killed more than 50 people, including an entire family of seven young children.
The UN protested at a “complete absence of accountability” for the escalating number of civilian deaths in Gaza, saying “the rule of the gun” had taken over. Doctors in Gaza said more than 40 people died, including children, in what appears to be the biggest single loss of life of the campaign when Israeli bombs hit al-Fakhora school, in Jabaliya refugee camp, while it was packed with hundreds of people who had fled the fighting.
Most of those killed were in the school playground and in the street, and the dead and injured lay in pools of blood. Pictures on Palestinian TV showed walls heavily marked by shrapnel and bloodstains, and shoes and shredded clothes scattered on the ground. Windows were blown out.
Hours before, three young men who were cousins died when the Israelis bombed Asma elementary school in Gaza City. They were among 400 people who had sought shelter there after fleeing their homes in Beit Lahiya, in northern Gaza.
Abed Sultan, 20, a student, and his cousins, Rawhi and Hussein Sultan, labourers aged 22, died. Abed Sultan’s father, Samir, said the bodies were so mangled that he could not tell his son from the cousins. “We came to the school when the Israelis warned us to leave,” he said. “We hoped it would be safe. We were 20 in one room. We had no electricity, no blankets, no food.
“Suddenly we heard a bomb that shook the school. Windows smashed. Children started to scream. A relative came and told me one of my sons was killed. I found my son’s body with his two cousins. They were cut into pieces by the shell.”
The UN was particularly incensed over targeting of the schools, because Israeli forces knew they were packed with families as they had ordered them to get out of their homes with leaflet drops and loudspeakers. It said it had identified the schools as refugee centres to the Israeli military and provided GPS coordinates.
Israel accused Hamas of using civilians as cover, and said the Islamist group could stop the assault on Gaza by ending its rocket attacks on Israel.
The Palestinian authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, last night delivered an impassioned plea to the UN security council to act immediately to stop the Israeli operation, which he described as a “catastrophe” for his people. Israel has agreed a “humanitarian corridor” to allow Palestinians to get essential goods.
The rising casualty toll, more than 640 Palestinians killed since the assault began 12 days ago, gave fresh impetus to diplomatic efforts. The White House offered its first hint of concern at Israel’s actions by calling on it to avoid civilian deaths. The president-elect, Barack Obama, broke his silence by saying he was “deeply concerned” about civilian casualties on both sides. He said he would have “plenty to say” about the crisis after his swearing in.
Gordon Brown said the Middle East was facing its “darkest moment yet” but hoped a ceasefire could be arranged soon.
Explaining its attack on al-Fahora school, the Israeli military claimed that a mortar was fired from the playground, and it responded with a single shell whichkilled known Hamas fighters; the resulting explosion was compounded because Hamas “booby-trapped the school”. Two Hamas militants were among the dead, both part of a rocket-launching cell.
The head of the UN Palestinian refugee agency, John Ging, said three shells landed at the perimeter of the school. “It was entirely inevitable if artillery shells landed in that area there would be a high number of casualties,” he said.
He said UN staff vetted those Palestinians who sought shelter at the school. “So far we’ve not had violations by militants of our facilities,” he said, though responding to questions he accepted there had been clashes between Hamas and the Israeli army in the area.
Earlier in the day, Ging visited Gaza’s hospital and was shocked at the scale of civilian casualties. “What you have in this hospital is the consequences of political failure and the complete absence of any accountability for actions that are being taken. It’s the rule of the gun now, and it has to stop,” he said.
At least 12 of one family, seven children aged from one to 12, three women and two men, were killed in an air strike on their house in Gaza City. Nine others were believed trapped.
Israel continues to insist most of those killed by its forces are Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters – although its assertion it is going to extraordinary lengths to target only “terrorists” has been undermined by a tank firing on a building used by Israeli troops, killing four of them, on Monday.
Another soldier was killed yesterday as Israeli forces continued their push into Gaza City. Tanks and troops also moved on the southern town of Khan Yunis.
The invasion has yet to achieve what Israel says is its goal of stopping rocket attacks. Hamas fired more than 30 into Israel yesterday, one to within 20 miles of Tel Aviv at Gadera, wounding a baby.
The de facto Hamas prime minister in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, issued a statement from hiding, saying that the Gazans would defeat Israel. “[Israel] has failed to force the population to surrender,” he said.
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Tags:civilian casualties, Gaza Strip, Israel, Israel's assault on Gaza, John Ging, killed and injured Gazans, PM Ismail Haniyeh, UN protests
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