In Beirut the Tragedy Goes On : 365 Dead, 1,682 Wounded as Christian Forces Fight

Surgeons operated by candlelight and emergency rooms used water boiled on kerosene stoves today as fighting between rival Christian forces plunged East Beirut into more desperate conditions.

In the ninth day of a showdown over control of Lebanon’s Christian enclave, Gen. Michel Aoun regrouped his army troops for a major assault to dislodge Samir Geagea’s Lebanese Forces militia from its besieged strongholds.

Geagea pleaded with President Francois Mitterrand of France “to act swiftly to arrange an immediate halt to the hysterical killing,” which has claimed about 365 lives and wounded 1,682, by police count.

Police said scores of the wounded, mostly civilians, are dying at hospitals due to scarcity of antibiotics and other medicines.

Aoun’s 20,000 troops and the 6,000-member militia are fighting across densely populated residential districts, seeking to control the 310-square-mile Christian enclave.

The Hotel Dieu and St. Joseph hospitals, the largest medical centers in Christian East Beirut, said in separate statements that they would bury about 30 victims in mass graves today. The bodies have been decomposing in morgues due to a total power failure.

A police spokesman said surgeons are carrying out operations in several hospitals with “candlelight in desperate efforts to rescue the victims.”

“Most hospitals have run out of diesel oil to operate their power generators. They are back to the 19th-Century methods of boiling water on kerosene stoves for the operation rooms,” the spokesman said.

French Humanitarian Minister Bernard Kouchner and Ambassador Rene Ala negotiated a 90-minute cease-fire along a narrow street needed to evacuate 12 seriously wounded from two hospitals.

At 9:30 a.m., a seven-ambulance convoy dashed across the divided city’s museum crossing to evacuate the wounded from the Hotel Dieu and St. Joseph hospitals as the factions exchanged sniper fire overhead.

The convoy drove the victims out of the Ashrafiyeh district to Beirut airport in the Syrian-policed Western sector, where a French plane waited to fly them for treatment in Paris. At one point, the convoy passed a white Mercedes. Its driver lay dead in the road beside his car.