A makeshift hospital serving Sri Lanka’s war zone is badly understaffed, running out of crucial medicines and overwhelmed by a flood of civilians wounded in intense fighting between the government and rebels, the top doctor there said.
Dr Thurairajah Varatharajah said the shrinking conflict zone — where aid groups say 200,000 civilians remain trapped — has been hit by unrelenting artillery fire and gunbattles over the past three to four weeks that are killing about 40 civilians and wounding 100 every day.
The government, on the brink of defeating the Tamil Tigers and ending the 25-year-old civil war, has denied targeting civilians, and the rebels have rejected such accusations as well. But scattered reports from aid workers, health officials and evacuees implicate both sides in the attacks.
Varatharajah, the government health officer for the Mullaittivu district, said on Friday that artillery was routinely hitting civilian areas in the region.
Confirmation of the reports was not available because independent journalists are barred from the war zone.
As the government broke through rebel defenses in recent weeks and surged forward, Varatharajah said he has repeatedly evacuated to shoddier facilities. He and his patients left the district hospital in Mullaittivu before the military overran that town on Jan. 25 and relocated to a small village hospital in Puthukkudiyiruppu.
But that hospital came under heavy shelling that killed at least 12 people, many of them patients. Last week, the staff and patients fled and set up a makeshift hospital in an abandoned school in the coastal town of Putumattalan.
That area was also shelled and 22 people were killed near the hospital on Monday, Varatharajah said.
The school had no reliable supply of drinking war, had only two toilets for hundreds of people and the facility was having trouble getting food, he told reporters by telephone.
The hospital had run out of penicillin and many other essential antibiotics and was facing a shortage of anesthetic as well, he said.
Only eight of the 30 doctors who normally work in the district remained, Varatharajah said, estimating that he needed at least 80 doctors to properly treat the wounded.
None of the remaining doctors are surgeons or anesthesiologists, but they were all performing emergency surgeries in an operating room they set up by throwing up a curtain and moving a table into a classroom, he said.
“We are always working,” he said, adding he performed an amputation and delivered a baby by Cesarean section on Friday morning.
Only three of the 20 nurses remained and as much as 90 percent of the rest of his staff stopped coming to work, he said.
“We are facing, in the hospital, big problems on all sides,” Varatharajah said.
With their limited facilities, the medical staff can’t treat major chest or head wounds, and most suffering those injuries die, he said. However, they have been able to treat most of the other wounded successfully, he said.
The Red Cross evacuated more than 600 patients and family members from the makeshift hospital by ferry this week, but with the fighting raging on, the hospital had 300 more wounded and another 200 patients suffering chronic disease in need of urgent evacuation, he said.
Many people were also suffering lung infections, fevers and coughs, probably from inhaling fumes and smoke from the incessant shelling, he said, coughing heavily as he spoke.
He did not say who he thought was firing the shells.
The artillery fire appeared to have stopped on Friday after the government declared a 12km coastal strip, that included the hospital, a “safe zone” and pledged not to attack it, he said.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to