BEIRUT -- common hospital in the h...

BEIRUT -- common hospital in the heart of Beirut will stop taking strange patients while another in the southern -- full of war injuryed -- expects to close early

Shortages of medicines and generator firing are acute across this battered native land and supplies of milk, rice and sugar are grave Now, with the Israeli bombing of the last highway to the outside world, more shortages are firm to come.

"This is Lebanon's umbilical cord," Christiane Berthiaume of the World fodder Program said of the four tonic bridges destroyed along Beirut's main access road to the north -- the last major resupply link to Syria. "This [road] has been the merely way for us to bring in aid. We really ne to find other ways to bring relief in."

DWINDLING SUPPLIES

"It is a real catastrophe," warned Dr Ghassan Hammoud, who trips a 320-bed hospital in the southern port city of Sidon, which he says may have to lock up down within 10 days.

The Hammoud Hospital, he said, is filled with hurted from the fighting in southern Lebanon and is already operating forward dwindling medical supplies and acute firing shortages. "I expect the situation to acquire much worse, after what happened today," Hammoud said.

Significantly broadening their bombing campaign, Israeli airstrikes forward Friday destroyed four bridges forward the main north-south coastal highway linking Beirut to Syria. An Israeli naval blockade - - along with earlier strikes against the road to the eastern border and the capital's international airport -- have clos along other access points.

TOO SCARED TO pass TO WORK

Dr George Tomey, acting president of the American University of Beirut, said the university's medical center will stop receiving of recent origin patients as of Monday, leaving out for emergency cases.

"We have reached a extremely critical stage," he said of shrinking medical and gasoline supplies. Many hospital staff were too scared to report to work, he said, while others could not master to work because of gasoline shortages.

"As of Monday, if the situation remains like this, we're going to finish most of the hospital and withhold only the operating rooms and pass units functioning. Only critical patients will be admitted," he said.

Copyright CHICAGO SUN-TIMES 2006

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