GAZA CITY: Gripping their wailing children, terrified Gaza civilians scuttled for any shelter they could find yesterday as Israeli tanks barreled into the heart of a residential neighborhood in Gaza City.
Loaded down with babies, toddlers and children, dozens of families arrived at the doors of the Al-Quds Hospital shortly after dawn as dozens of tanks roared into the area, sparking furious battles with Palestinian fighters.
Inside the facility, the residents found space where they could. Mothers tried to console their crying children and to make them laugh. “I brought the children to the hospital because they were scared at home, but here they are even more terrified,” said Hossein, 40, who huddled in the pediatric ward with his wife and five children.
“The house next door was completely destroyed in the fighting so we had to get out of there. We can’t take this any longer. Look at my children, they’re trembling.” But as the frightened civilians took refuge in the facility, part of the hospital caught fire after an Israeli strike. The blaze was brought under control in the medical area but not in the administrative building.
The attack put about 100 patients and medical staff at risk, according to the international Red Cross, while a doctor inside said many of them were trapped.
“The Israelis are bombing and attacking all around the hospital. We can’t get out. There’s fire, and we’re trapped inside. The water has been cut off,” French doctor Regis Garrigue told AFP by telephone from the building.
Meanwhile, Bashar Murad, a doctor and the head of the ambulance services for the Red Crescent, waited helplessly.
“I have three dead bodies at 500 meters, but I can’t get to them,” he said. “I have numerous wounded less than a kilometer away, but I can’t move without authorization,” Murad said.
Before the ambulances can move, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) must call the Israeli Army and receive a green light to move in a certain area, he said. “It’s hard for me to stay here while people may be dying. But I don’t have a choice.”
And at Egypt’s Rafah border crossing with Gaza, two Israeli warplanes loop above on a bombing run. Their payload sends up a black cloud on the other side of the boundary.
A Palestinian ambulance drives in to transfer a Gazan amputee to an Egyptian hospital — like the hundreds of other victims of Israel’s 19-day-old war on the embattled Palestinian territory.
“He is ICU, ICU,” yells a paramedic inside the ambulance, nervously eyeing the cameras encircling him and the patient.
The wounded man bound for the ICU, or intensive care unit, is lifted from a bloody stretcher and transferred past a cordon of medics to an ambulance on the Egyptian side.
There, a Japanese psychiatrist and four French doctors wait for Egyptian security officials to let them go in the opposite direction, into the war-ravaged Gaza Strip.
Norihiko Kuwayama, chief director of a Japanese psychiatric hospital, tries to bargain with security to be allowed in, only to be told he must show them a letter from his embassy.
International doctors called for an end to the violence in Gaza, saying hospitals were scenes of “nightmarish havoc” in articles published in The Lancet medical journal.
In a special report detailing the human toll of the Gaza offensive, the Lancet said Al-Shifa Hospital asked for extra refrigeration equipment before the bodies of patients with severe wounds began decomposing.
