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The Jordanian Hospital, a ramshackle collection of white trailers, lies just beyond the eastern exit of Fallujah, the besieged city of bullet-scarred homes and factories.
Its 30 beds have been underused during one of the biggest military offensives in Iraq since the US invasion of the country more than a year ago.
But the few operations that doctors have carried out over the last two weeks of conflict still contrasts sharply with the city's main General Hospital, located on Fallujahs north-western perimeter.
The General Hospital shut its doors days after the US marines sealed off the city, considered a bastion of the resistance in Iraq, as part of a massive crackdown launched some two weeks ago.
Most of the wounded from the embattled community of about 300,000 have been taken to four small clinics inside Fallujah or in ambulance convoys to Baghdad that cross marine lines at least three times daily, marked with Red Crescent flags.
US coalition officials have also acknowledged the urgent need to ensure medical treatment for those hurt in the conflict. Marine officers have speculated that insurgents may be firing on troops from family homes, leaving civilians trapped in the ensuing crossfire.
Medical relief has also been severely hampered by the insurgents hijacking of ambulances to ferry weapons and fighters around Fallujah, according to the coalition.
Following high-level truce talks on Friday and Saturday, the Marines have repositioned their troops to permit Fallujahs General Hospital to reopen.
The US-led coalitions gesture is meant to dramatically improve medical treatment in a city where local officials put the number of dead and wounded in the hundreds since fighting started.
The Jordanian hospital staff has watched the bloody events unfold, frustrated by their inability to get patients to the facility despite being right outside Fallujah.
"There is a need for our services but we are not doing a lot of things. We are just few kilometers (miles) from Fallujah and we cannot help them," said Dr Samir Sumadi on Friday.
US forces have promised to allow passage to the Jordanian hospital but negotiating Fallujahs streets, where gun battles can erupt at any moment, has left many afraid to venture out.
Most of the wounded brought to the hospital, opened last April by the Jordanian government, have come from villages surrounding the Sunni Muslim city, including Qarna, the site of fierce fighting last week.
Marines have escorted six injured to the hospital from Fallujah. A three-year-old boy with shrapnel wounds to the back died there, said Dr Ahmed Zawahreh.
An Egyptian driver had infected shrapnel wounds to the buttocks, he added.
Staff have buried two males in the hard brown desert around the isolated compound.
One was a 70-year-old man killed by shrapnel fragments to his mouth; the other was an unidentified corpse, with bruises and rope burns on the arms and legs, which was dropped off by US troops, said Zawahreh and hospital director Colonel Hisham al-Farrouri.
Farrouri said they did not know the circumstances of the 25-year-old mans death; Marines had no record of the incident.
Forty patients have arrived at the hospital during the course of the latest fighting, which had subsuded over the weekend as coalition officials and local leaders met to hammer out a lasting cease-fire.
Some 35 of the wounded had shrapnel or bullet wounds. The hospital has sent 600 pints of blood to clinics in the city, Zawahreh said.
The hospital has also endured nightly mortar fire intended for a nearby US checkpoint, Farrouri said. Two rockets smashed into the hospitals womens clinic on Thursday night, severely wounding a doctor.
He lay in bed Friday with white bandages caked in blood over his lower abdomen and a drip bag dangling to the floor.
"It is difficult to work in such conditions," Zawahreh said, amid a sea of mainly empty hospital cots.

Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2004

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