GAZA: Sitting in his bare office at the end of another day of frustration, Ibrahim el-Habbash, the director of Gaza’s largest hospital, shakes his head before letting it drop heavily into his hands.

“The store is empty, we don’t have the resources,” he says, looking up at his chief neurosurgeon and the head of the hospital’s surgical operations as if for inspiration. Both men sit silently in their seats looking down at an empty table.

“I don’t know how we’re going to cope,” says Habbash, his forehead wrinkling and eyes tearing in distress, as if he can’t quite believe where he and the hospital have ended up now that funds to keep it running have been cut off.

Habbash, a gynaecologist by training, is the head of Shifa, a 600-bed institution that is not only the largest in Gaza, the poor Mediterranean strip where 1.4mn Palestinians live, but, he says proudly, “the largest in all Palestine”.

Founded 60 years ago by the Egyptian government, Shifa has had a proud history, including doctors performing open-heart surgery in the 1990s and brain surgery 15 years ago.

But in the past four months, since Hamas won Palestinian elections and Israel and the West cut off funding to the government because of Hamas’s militancy, it has entered a dark chapter that Habbash says may even force it to close.

Entirely reliant on government funding, Shifa’s 1,400 staff haven’t been paid for more than three months. Many doctors and nurses can’t afford to get to work each day and some have left to join NGOs that do pay salaries, Habbash says.

Medical supplies, including basic items such as anaesthetic, are either running short or have run out, not just because there isn’t the money to buy them, but because they aren’t getting across the border from Israel into Gaza regularly enough.

“We have 600 chronic kidney cases where they need dialysis three times a week, but we can’t provide it,” Habbash says, running a hand through his short red hair. “We’ve had to cut the treatments down to twice or even once a week.”

There are just two days’ worth of anaesthetic left and virtually no cancer treatment drugs. “In the past two months we’ve gone back 20 years in the treatment of cancer,” he says.

Mortality rates are rising, although there are no hard figures available. “Before, we were in crisis management, now we are in disaster management,” the director adds.

For the hospital’s administrators, Hamas’s rise to power has had bitter consequences. None professes to back Hamas, although they do think the Islamist group should be given a chance to show whether it can govern efficiently. Habbash is a supporter of Fatah, the long-dominant political movement that was beaten by Hamas in January’s election. But most importantly, he says, politics should play no part in determining how vital services such as a hospital are run.

He’s trying to separate the hospital from the Hamas-led health ministry so that it might be able to receive direct and reliable funding from the European Union instead, but it’s a delicate issue and he doesn’t expect success anytime soon.

“When I began as a doctor, I never imagined ending up in a situation like this,” he says. “The hospital could close, maybe. We don’t really know if we can continue.”

With tensions on the streets between armed Hamas and Fatah factions, and frequent Israeli shelling of Gaza in response to rocket attacks from Gaza militants, the fear is that large numbers could get wounded and not be able to be treated.

“It’s like running a bank with no money,” says Habbash, as the meeting with his staff breaks up without much resolution.

As he walks from his office into a palm-tree courtyard at the centre of Shifa’s collection of whitewashed buildings, Habbash is followed to his car by a small group of staff.

Again shaking his head in despair, he explains: “These are the people I have to drive home because they have no money.”

l Israeli soldiers yesterday arrested a wounded Palestinian militant from his hospital bed in an intensive care unit at a church-run clinic in the occupied West Bank, officials said.

Jawad al-Kaabi, a member of the armed wing of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), was arrested by the Israeli unit at the Saint Luke Hospital in the northern city of Nablus.

Kaabi, 20, had been shot in the stomach on Wednesday during an Israeli operation in the Balata refugee camp in Nablus. - Agencies