chaos in Gaza after Israeli blast hits vegetable market

Nobody even knows what kind of shell it was that hit Gaza City’s main vegetable market this morning – the explosives are falling so thick and fast it could have come from an Israeli naval vessel, an F-16 fighter-bomber, an Apache helicopter gunship, an unmanned drone, an artillery cannon or a tank.

But the results were unmistakable. With Gaza’s ambulance service stretched far beyond its normal capacity, the first mangled bodies arrived in private cars as locals scrambled to save the lives of the shoppers.

The first to be carried in was a boy, his face masked in blood from a head wound as medics whisked him into the overcrowded emergency rooms. The next car disgorged a girl, perhaps 12 or 13 years old, her entrails blown out through a hole in her back by shrapnel.

Then, finally, an ambulance arrived ferried in a man whose legs had cut to pieces by the blast. The driver left his vehicle in the forecourt to help carry the dismembered patient inside.

But then more ambulances started streaming in, their path blocked by the first. Chaos erupted outside the hospital entrance, as a traffic jam of desperate ambulance and car drivers log-jammed the yard.

Unable to find the first ambulance driver or the keys, people were forced to push the vehicle out of the way before the macabre procession of dead and maimed could resume.

Medics said five people were killed in the market bombing, and 40 wounded. Israel said it had no knowledge of a market being hit. But at the same time, victims from other areas of the bombarded city were streaming in, including two elderly women in house-coats.

Doctors at the hospital are exhausted by the constant stream of casualties, the worry about dwindling medical supplies and the threat of diesel for their generators running out, which would switch off vital life-support systems.

Yet every minute they have to make life or death triage judgements.

“We are so tired we are probably making poor decisions about who to save and who not to,� said one drawn-looking doctor. “I think we are losing patients because of this.�

A Norwegian volunteer doctor, Eric Fosse, working at al-Shifa, the central hospital of Gaza City, said almost 30 per cent of the casualties were children. He said two young boys had been hit by shrapnel when they were playing on the roof of their house because their parents had forbidden them from going on to Gaza’s deadly streets. One was killed and the other critically wounded, with one leg amputated.

Palestinian medics also said a tanks shell killed five members of the same family as they were driving in their car near Gaza City, as desperate civilians fled areas of fighting. Among the dead was a 14-year-old girl, they said.

But still the onslaught continued, with explosions and the menacing thud of Apache heavy machinegun fire echoing across the strip as the deadly day turned into yet another terrifying, sleepless night.