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View Full Version : Lebanon Hospitals Brace for the Worst



sonz
07-23-2006, 10:25 AM
NABATIYEH, Lebanon — Water is cut off, the electricity is down, and medicine can only reach Nabatiyeh hospital across broken roads and through Israeli air strikes.

The hospital, in the rolling hills of southern Lebanon, is like any hospital in the heavily-battered south, working round the clock to cope with the rising number of injured and corpses arriving hour in and hour out since the start of the bloody 10-day-old Israeli assault. But doctors fear worse is ahead.

"We are worried about the next few days, because it sounds like things are escalating," Director Marwan Ghandour told Reuters Saturday, July 22.

He said the hospital could be flooded with patients if Israel launches a ground offensive across the border, just 20 km (12 miles) to the south.

"We expect more injuries," he added, as Israeli jets circled in the sky above the hospital and explosions sounded regularly in the distance.

Although spared the scale of destruction seen in the port of Tyre to the southwest, this mainly Shiite town of around 7,000 bears the scars of a conflict which has killed at least 345 people in Lebanon, the vast majority civilians, and driven hundreds of thousands from their homes.

"The other day there were four raids. We had 20 injured, mainly shrapnel, burns and broken limbs," said Abbas Lezeik, a doctor in the emergency department.

Shops in Nabatiyeh were shuttered and streets were quiet on Saturday. In the central market several two-storey buildings had been reduced to rubble and mangled metal by rockets which left a carpet of grey dust and broken glass on the ground.

Some cars which did brave the roads — many of them heading north after Israel warned them to leave border villages — had white sheets flapping from windows and aerials in the hope it might protect them from attack.

Impassable

A woman walks past a damaged house in Nabatiyeh. (Reuters)

Already the fighting has posed severe challenges for hospitals in the south, which have to rely on tankers to bring water and generators for electricity after both were cut off.

"We are afraid the fuel will not be enough so we are rationing it," Ghandour said.

It can take hours to ferry the wounded to hospitals because some roads are impassable, and the drivers fear that even ambulances could be targeted.

And it's not just the living who get trapped.

"We have 12 corpses in the morgue which can't be buried because the families cannot get to the hospital to take them," Ghandour said.

United Nations relief agencies warned on Friday, July 21, that disease could sweep through overwhelmed refugee centers and hospitals in southern Lebanon unless Israel pledges not to attack supply lines.

Ghandour said the hospital's renal unit was working non-stop because other medical centers have been cut off by the fighting, and its supplies were running low.

Stocks of blood were also inadequate to meet any big demand, he added.

"If we have an emergency we will have a major problem."

In the intensive care unit was an 11-year-old boy, his head and legs bandaged and his right eye bloodshot.

Doctors said Amin Hassan Al-Haj lost his mother and two brothers in an Israeli bombing that wounded him, and his father has not yet been able to return from Saudi Arabia to see him.

"He wants to speak to his mother. They haven't told him yet," said Lezeik.

http://islamonline.net/English/News/2006-07/22/05.shtml
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