Procession of lame leaves the dead in Nablus

THE doors of the mosque creak open and a foetid stream of damp air escapes from the building that for five days has served as charnel house and field hospital.
Inside is death and blood. Ten bodies are lain in a row in the courtyard, while 30 wounded Palestinians walk and crawl, moaning, across the blue linoleum that has been torn up to serve as stretcher, blanket and shroud.

In the deepest corner of the war zone that is Nablus kasbah, Palestinian doctors and ambulance workers have been trapped for five days in the al-Baiq Mosque, treating fighters and civilians injured since the Israeli attack on the West Bank’s most famous kasbah began.

Leaning over drips nearly empty of fluid, Zahra al-Wawe worked without electricity, blood banks or ambulances, pleading for help over her mobile telephone until the battery ran dry, shouting: “We are losing them, we are losing them.”

Three more died yesterday, she said, and finally, as dusk fell over the old city that has seen some of the fiercest clashes between Palestinians and Israelis, something snapped. Suddenly, waving white rags above their heads, Palestinian Red Crescent workers emerged from the mosque, walking, stumbling, climbing and falling through the wreckage of what remains of the kasbah, carrying stretchers to ambulances that they hoped, but did not know, would be waiting at the city entrance.