Hospitals in Baghdad are being overwhelmed by new patients, are running out of medicine and are short of water and electricity, the Red Cross has said.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which is still operating in Baghdad, says the war is stretching the capital's medical resources to their limit.

Around the city, casualties have been admitted on an average of 100 per hour, with staff working day and night.

Wards at the five major hospitals treating wounded were already overflowing with injured when American troops made their first incursion on Saturday.

Medicines such as analgesics, antibiotics, anaesthetics and insulin, as well as surgical items are now running out.

ICRC spokesman Roland Huguenin-Benjamin said of the al-Kindi hospital in north-eastern Baghdad: "Surgeons have been working round the clock for the past two days and most are exhausted. Conditions are terrible.

"You could hear very close range explosions. The windows are rattling from the thud of explosions."

Al-Kindi was the only hospital the ICRC could reach on Monday.

Mr Huguenin-Benjamin said hospitals were now relying on generators and that getting clean water to patients was a priority.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has warned of a health emergency both in Baghdad and in the country as a whole.

Work suspended

The struggle to treat the injured in Baghdad has been complicated further by the disappearance of two aid workers from Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) in Baghdad.

MSF's head of mission in the city, 43-year-old Frenchman François Calas, and Ibrahim Younis, a 31-year-old logistician of Sudanese descent, were last seen on Wednesday.

In a statement released on Monday, MSF said it had to assume that Iraqi officials were holding the two men.

The four remaining members of the six-strong MSF team are still in the Iraqi capital.

MSF's Martyn Broughton told BBC News Online that the team had suspended its work at al-Kindi in response to the disappearance.

Stephen Crawshaw, director of Human Rights Watch in London, told the BBC he was concerned at possible siege tactics in Baghdad, as they might involve "starvation and failure to have access to water".

"It is certainly worrying if we hear talk of ways of prosecuting this war where the concerns of civilians are, if you like, put to one side," he said.

The US military command has talked of "isolating" Baghdad, where the Iraqi Government is still putting up resistance, rather than storming it.

Limited success

ICRC spokeswoman in Geneva, Antonella Notari, told the BBC the organisation might need to bring extra supplies into Baghdad from warehouses in Iran, Kuwait, Jordan or Syria, depending on the length of the fighting, the number of new casualties and security guarantees.

In general, aid agencies have had only limited success in shipping food relief to Iraq, notably to the Kurdish north, although a United Nations team is now assessing conditions at the deep-water port of Umm Qasr in the south.

Caroline Hurford, a public information officer at the UN World Food Programme's Cyprus-based office for Iraq, told BBC News Online that food aid was reaching the north but security concerns were holding up deliveries in the south.

Some 25,000 people in rural areas have received wheat flour - the critical commodity for Iraqis - since lorries carrying 850 metric tons reached Dahuk at the weekend, and a further 1,000 tons is on its way to Irbil.

The WFP has about 30,000 tons of food aid ready to be moved into the south of Iraq, but is waiting for security clearance at Umm Qasr.

The UN's children's agency Unicef has been tankering water to hospitals and other facilities in the area between Umm Qasr and Basra for several days, Anis Salem, Unicef's communications chief in Amman, told BBC News Online.

Tanker drivers report that with electricity down in many areas, hospitals are badly affected and cases of diarrhoea among children are on the increase.