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WHEN bombs go off around you and bullets zip by, one would expect a hospital to be the safest place to be in.

But not in Gaza.

With gunmen using their rooftops as sniper positions and doctors and nurses afraid to come to work, Gaza's hospitals are finding themselves on the front lines of the Palestinians' increasingly bloody internal fight.

One of the eight hospitals in the coastal territory bordering Israel was shut down after three people were killed there. The others are understaffed and harassed by militants battling from their roofs and corridors, even as more casualties are carried in needing treatment.

Gunmen from the rival Fatah and Hamas movements are engaged in a battle for power that has left more than 80 dead and hundreds wounded in Gaza in the last month.

'We ourselves are not secure. How can we look after the lives of others?' said DrAyed al-Wahidi at Shifa Hospital, Gaza's largest medical centre.

AMBULANCE ATTACKED

While fighting between Fatah and Hamas raged on the hospital's grounds on Monday, Shifa had to dispatch an ambulance to pick up a trauma specialist, and the ambulance itself came under fire, he said.

The doctor eventually made it. But other doctors and nurses have not been able to get to work, leaving the hospital understaffed and barely able to handle the relentless stream of casualties.

Masked men have been roaming the hospital, occasionally clashing with each other.

'We don't know who they are or who they are fighting,' said Dr Wessam Awadallah, another doctor at the hospital.

In the European Hospital in the town of Khan Yunis, Hamas-affiliated security guards used the hospital's roof as a staging ground for an assault on a nearby Fatah position yesterday, head of nursing Atta al-Jaabari told AP.

The assault caused a 'state of panic' among the medical staff and threatened children at a kindergarten for employees' children on the grounds, he said.

Doctors treated three of the wounded as the battle continued.

Afterwards, the hospital sent home all non-essential staff and patients whose lives were not in danger. The doctors and nurses remained.

In the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun, one hospital shut down after three people were shot dead inside on Monday. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, one was killed in the operating room.

As the fighting raged, CNN reported that the Palestine Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was considering pulling Fatah out of the unity government with Islamist Hamas until the bloody fighting stoppped.

Gaza is now on the brink of civil war.

'If anybody thinks that we will be a winner out of this fire, I think they're wrong,' said Palestinian official Saeb Erakat. 'If this fire continues, it will burn all of us. Nobody stands to gain anything.'

Mr Abbas' Fatah group dominated Palestinian politics for decades until last year, when Hamas won legislative elections.

The residences of both MrAbbas and of Prime Minister Ismail Haniya, of Hamas, have been targeted with gun and shell fire.

Gaza is about 45km long and 10km wide. It is wedged between Israel to the north and east, and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula to the south.

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