At the Hospitals, They Wait and Worry
The staff at the Al Awda Hospital sleeps in this camp these days, working 24-hour shifts and then taking a break in the cafeteria to await a possible attack.

Elsewhere inside the refugee camp, at a United Nations clinic, ambulance drivers bunk in a small room, also marking time, with bulletproof vests and helmets nearby. Storeroom shelves are stocked with painkillers and antibiotics. Boxes of bandages and cylinders of oxygen are stacked on the floor.

It is a slow game of wondering in the afternoon heat. Will the Israelis retaliate in response to a suicide bomber who killed 15 people near Tel Aviv last Tuesday? If they do, will it be a full-scale invasion, carefully selected raids or simply attacks from the air?

"The waiting, the waiting," said Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sitta in the Al Awda cafeteria. "After a while the waiting gets to you."

Throughout the Gaza Strip, the narrow band of coastal land that has become the expected next target of Israel's military since the latest suicide bombing, medical staffs are preparing for a disaster that might easily overwhelm them.

Gaza is densely populated and even in peaceful circumstances its hospitals and clinics have a limited capacity to treat trauma patients. But medical staffs face an additional worry: whether they will be able to treat patients at all.

In the recent cycle of escalating violence, which has prompted escalating security measures, Israeli soldiers operating in the West Bank last month restricted and sometimes prohibited the movement of ambulances through areas they had seized. They also sometimes turned back doctors trying to go from their homes to their hospitals.

The Israeli military said its decision was rooted in a practical security concern: some ambulances carried weapons or gunmen, and so all ambulances had to be checked. For the Palestinian doctors, the decision was a medical nightmare. Injured people could not get professional medical care or be evacuated in time. Some later died of their wounds or required surgery to amputate infected limbs.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/12/international/middleeast/12GAZA.html