News Service from House Harris

MID: The macabre count of Dr Hassanein in Gaza

GAZA CITY, Jan 11 AFP - Doctor Muawiya Hassanein has no time for pleasantries these days. When a journalist calls, he barks out the latest number of the dead from Israel's war in Gaza and hangs up, getting back to his macabre count.

The head of emergency services for the Gaza Strip, Hassanein is the sole person who keeps a running track of the ever-escalating death toll of Israel's deadliest offensive ever in the overcrowded enclave.

"Every day, I get at least 200 phone calls from journalists and I give more than a dozen interviews," says the exhausted 55-year-old. "I never hold back on information."

Unshaven, his white hair rumpled, Hassanein has had a telephone - be it a mobile or a landline - attached to his ear nearly continuously since Israel unleashed its Operation Cast Lead on December 27 with a massive, nearly simultaneous bombing that killed more than 200 people across Gaza.

Behind the desk in his modest office hangs a portrait of legendary Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and his successor Mahmud Abbas - pictures that virtually disappeared from Gaza officialdom after Hamas seized power in the territory in June 2007.

Voices bark out of the walkie-talkie on the spare wooden desk.

The father of five has not been back to the house he shares with his Romanian-born wife - he met her while studying for his medical degree in Romania in the early 1980s - for two weeks.

"I sleep in my office, and only about three hours a day, catching a nap here and there."

When it's not journalists calling, Hassanein talks to medics on the ground, who keep him updated on the number of dead and wounded.

He scribbles the name of every "martyr" in illegible handwriting on pieces of loose-leaf paper that, when full, he slides into a white folder - one for each week of the war.

In the rare times that the phones fall silent, he adds up the grim numbers he has scrawled.

Hardened by years of deadly violence inside the tiny enclave, he picks up the phone himself to alert the press when a particularly deadly strike or the discovery of bodies beneath the rubble spikes the toll.

Showing visible signs of fatigue two weeks into the Israeli offensive, Hassanein does not mince words when talking to local media.

"This is a new massacre, a new slaughter that decimated a family in Jabaliya," he railed to a Gaza radio station that interviewed him on Saturday morning.

"The Israeli aggression is sparing nothing and no-one," he says.

Aside from keeping track of the dead and the wounded, Hassanein also keeps control of the ambulances, sending them to scenes of new strikes.

"We have 57 ambulances, with only 35 working like they should," he says. "In normal times, we need 80 ambulances more, and in a situation like today, we need more than 100."

In his office, he keeps the remains of an Israeli rocket that killed one of his medics several days ago.

"I also get scared when I move around between hospitals and the sites of Israeli attacks."

By late Saturday, the last figures scribbled by Dr Hassanein were 828 killed, including 236 children and 98 women.

"I am also a human being and when I see the bodies of children and of women, it hurts me, but I hold back my tears in order not to demoralise the rescue workers."