Occupied Jerusalem: The International Committee of the Red Cross said yesterday that it had found at least 15 bodies and several children - emaciated but alive - in a row of shattered houses in the Gaza Strip and accused the Israeli military of preventing ambulances from reaching the site for four days.

Red Cross officials said rescue crews had received specific reports of casualties in the houses and had been trying since Saturday to send ambulances to the area, located in Zaytoun, a neighbourhood south of Gaza City. They said the Israeli military did not grant permission until yesterday afternoon.

In an unusual public statement issued by its Geneva headquarters, the Red Cross called the episode "unacceptable" and said the Israeli military had "failed to meet its obligation under international humanitarian law to care for and evacuate the wounded."

When rescue workers from the Red Cross and the Palestinian Red Crescent arrived at the site, they found 12 corpses lying on mattresses in one home, along with four young children lying next to their dead mothers, the Red Cross said. The children were too weak to stand and were rushed to a nearby hospital, the agency said.

A spokesman for the Israel Defence Forces declined to comment early yesterday on the specific allegations made by the Red Cross, but said in a statement that the military "has demonstrated its willingness to abort operations to save civilian lives and to risk injury in order to assist innocent civilians."

In the Zaytoun incident, the Red Cross said its workers evacuated 18 wounded survivors from the houses in donkey carts. They said ambulances could not reach the site because of earthen barriers erected around the neighbourhood by the Israeli military. Red Cross officials said Israeli soldiers posted nearby tried to chase rescue workers away from the site but that the rescuers refused to leave.

"This is a shocking incident," Pierre Wettach, the Red Cross's head of delegation for Israel and the Palestinian territories, said in a statement. "The Israeli military must have been aware of the situation but did not assist the wounded. Neither did they make it possible for us or the Palestine Red Crescent to assist the wounded." The Geneva Conventions provide that parties to a conflict "at all times" should "without delay" take "all possible measures to search for and collect the wounded and sick, to protect them against pillage and ill-treatment, to ensure their adequate care, and to search for the dead and prevent their being despoiled." The conventions also say that wounded "shall not willfully be left without medical assistance and care."

Unlawful and heartless

The Red Cross said it was able to remove only three of the bodies and had received reports of other casualties nearby.

The agency that said it was trying to return to the site but that negotiations with the Israeli military to guarantee safe passage were ongoing.

Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch said Israel and Egypt should open their borders with Gaza to let civilians and the wounded to flee the fighting from which there is no other escape.

"There is no place safe from the fighting for civilians in Gaza at this time," HRW emergencies researcher Fred Abrahams said in a statement.

Abrahams said: "For Israel and Egypt to continue blocking the evacuation of severely wounded people is not only unlawful but heartless."

- With additional inputs from agencies