Israeli street battles take toll on medics, civilians

McClatchy Newspapers

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — They come in waves, usually not long after a blast rattles the building or a black cloud of smoke rises up over the apartment buildings.

First come the ambulances, careening through Shifa Hospital’s crowded courtyard as frenzied medics rush bloody patients through mobs of Palestinians who have come in previous waves to find out if their relatives are alive or dead.

Then come beat-up cars packed with Palestinians injured by Israeli shrapnel: brothers carrying bloodied younger sisters, fathers carrying lifeless sons, uncles carrying wailing nephews.

Shifa Hospital has long been crisis central for the Gaza Strip. In a seemingly endless series of conflicts, the wounded always come here.

Even doctors seasoned in Gaza’s many emergencies, however, are reeling from the scale and intensity of the latest Israeli assault, which has killed more than 550 Palestinians and injured 2,500 others in 10 days of fighting.

As Israel’s campaign against the militant Islamist group Hamas shifts from targeted airstrikes to intense artillery barrages and street battles, the number of civilians caught in the crossfire is growing. Now the military strikes are also taking a toll on the harried medical crews sent into the urban battlefields to rescue wounded survivors.

At least six medics have been killed by Israeli strikes, and three ambulances have been destroyed by Israeli fire, according to United Nations officials.

“There are no safe areas, and Gazans who want to flee the fighting have been prevented from leaving the Strip,” said John Prideaux-Brune, the head of Oxfam-Great Britain’s Palestinian office.

Prideaux-Brune lost one Palestinian colleague on Sunday when an Israeli shell hit the ambulance he was in as it tried to spirit a wounded patient away from advancing Israeli forces in the northern Gaza City town of Beit Lahiya.

The increasing risk to medics means that some emergency calls are going unanswered.

“Some wounded people simply die while waiting for an ambulance,” said Antoine Grand, the head of the Red Cross office in the Gaza Strip. “This is of course absolutely appalling.”

The Israeli military says it’s doing all it can to avoid civilian casualties.