ABC News:
RAFAH, Gaza Strip — The roads are so ravaged that the dead and wounded arrive by donkey cart. Desperate relatives rush bloodied and dust-covered people, many of them children, to the hospital.
Naseem Hassan, a 48-year-old Palestinian medic in the Gaza Strip’s southern town of Khan Younis, said it had become impossible to walk through Nasser Hospital, with people spread out everywhere. Some patients, terrified or semiconscious, tugged at his sleeve when he squeezed through the halls. They groaned, slept and died on those bloodstained floors, he said.
His skeletal staff at the 350-bed hospital has struggled to cope with an influx of over 1,000 patients. Without fresh bandages and gauze, Doctors Without Borders said, patients’ wounds have become seriously infected, in many cases septic.
“When I think about it for a moment, I start to cry,” Hassan said by phone, struggling to be heard over the shouts of the doctors and nurses who remained. “It’s a good thing I’m too tired to think.”
On Dec. 7, United Nations monitors said the hospital received its first delivery of supplies since Nov. 29. The World Health Organization delivered trauma and emergency care supplies to the area for about 4,500 patients.
