Gaza City, Gaza Strip - As the Israeli bombardment continued early today, residents pulled relatives from the rubble of prominent institutions leveled by waves of Israeli F-16 attacks, hospitals struggled to keep up with the wounded and the dead, and doctors scrambled for scarce medical supplies. Hamas gunmen shot alleged collaborators with Israel in public. Around the city, families huddled around battery-powered radios, desperate for information.
Israel sent in about 40 trucks carrying humanitarian relief supplies, including blood from Jordan and medicine. Egypt opened its border with Gaza to some similar aid and to allow some wounded through.
At Shifa Hospital in Gaza, the director, Dr. Hussein Ashour, said that keeping his wounded patients alive was an enormous challenge. He said there were about 1,500 wounded people distributed among Gaza's nine hospitals with far too few intensive-care units, equipped ambulances or other kinds of vital medical equipment.
Yesterday, he was not the only official in charge there. Armed Hamas militants in civilian clothes roamed the halls. Asked their function, they said they were providing security. But there was internal bloodletting under way.
In the fourth-floor orthopedic section, a woman in her late 20s asked a militant to let her see Saleh Hajoj, her 32-year-old husband. She was turned away and left the hospital.
Fifteen minutes later, Hajoj was carried out of his room by young men pretending to transfer him to another hospital section. As he lay on the stretcher, he was shot in the left side of the head.
Hajoj, like five others who have been killed at the hospital this way in the past 24 hours, was accused of collaboration with Israel. He had been in the central prison awaiting trial by Hamas judges, and when Israeli warplanes destroyed the prison Sunday, he and the others were transferred to the hospital. But their trials were short-circuited.
A crowd at the hospital showed no mercy after the shooting, which was widely observed. A man in his 30s mocked a woman who expressed horror at the scene.
"This horrified you?" he shouted. "A collaborator that caused the death of many innocent and resistance fighters?"
Sobhia Jomaa, a lawyer with the Palestinian Independent Commission for Human Rights, said 115 accused collaborators were in the central prison. None had been executed by Hamas since it took office, and their cases were monitored closely.
