Gaza City/Tel Aviv  - After three weeks of relentless Israeli air strikes and two weeks of heavy ground fighting, Gazans, exhausted, are hoping the end may be near, but also afraid to face the devastation around them once a truce is in place.

A huge rehabilitation effort will be needed to rebuild the buildings and infrastructure destroyed in what a military spokesman in Tel Aviv said Friday were well over 2,000 air strikes throughout the strip over the past three weeks.

Doctors and nurses in Gaza, many of whom have been working continuous 12-hour shifts over the past three weeks to treat the couple of hundred of newly injured coming in each day, are especially exhausted.

They need urgent reinforcements to help care for the critically wounded and avoid the risk of serious medical or surgical errors, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned.

Despite the now daily three- or four-hour humanitarian lulls which Israel has been implementing, allowing dozens of trucks carrying food and medical supplies to enter through its border crossings of Kerem Shalom and Karni each day, hospitals are using up so much that they are still in urgent need of such basic items as antibiotics, intra-vascular fluids, painkillers and disposables.

International organizations have donated large amounts, but many are held up at the Palestinian side of the border because of "security constraints," said the WHO in a statement.

One truckload of medical supplies which arrived at the Kerem Shalom on Thursday for example was stranded at the border because no UN convoy was available to transport the cargo to its destination.

So far, some 380 of the seriously injured have been transferred to Egypt, but doctors are calling for the urgent transfer of more patients to hospitals outside Gaza, which has
27 hospitals with only 2,000 beds, and another 56 or so clinics.

Several of those located close to targets bombed, shelled or rocketed by Israel have been damaged, as have a number of UN facilities, including at least four schools and the main Gaza City compound of UNWRA, the agency caring for Palestinian refugees, in Gaza City. Three shells hit the compound Thursday, setting ablaze a workshop and the agency's main warehouse storing hundreds of tonnes of humanitarian supplies.

As soon as the offensive is over, "we would have to do a damage assessment of our facilities and to start to rebuild what is damaged or destroyed," Chris Gunness, an UNWRA spokesman, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa Friday.

He said it was too early to say how much had been damaged or to estimate the cost of the reconstruction effort.

"It's still a war going on," he said.

In the meantime, UNWRA had to provide the basic needs of 40,000 displaced people who have fled to over 40 shelters set up by the agency mostly in its schools.

Three weeks into the offensive, 60 per cent of the strip's nearly 1.5 million inhabitants are still without electricity and about one-third without running water.

Israel has been allowing industrial diesel into Gaza for its main power station, which supplies mostly northern Gaza and Gaza City.

But the plant is still only operating partially because not all the fuel could be delivered amid the ongoing bombardments, said the UN Agency for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

Much of the damage done to the main power lines running from Israel to Gaza, which supply the rest of the strip - was repaired last week, but several local auxiliary lines were still damaged.

As a result water pumps are also not working. Those without water have had to queue outside UN distribution centres and warehouses to get bottled water, or to fill jerricans from tabs on ground floors.

Sewage water has also flooded into the streets of Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya, north of Gaza City, because UNWRA was unable to deliver fuel to the area's wastewater treatment plant.

"Over the past three weeks there were maybe three or four days that we had electricity, each time for five hours," said one Gaza City resident Friday, adding he and his family are still spending their evenings huddled around candles in winter coats.

"I bought more than enough, just in case. Many people did the same thing," said the father of four, who preferred not to be named, of the candles. He was able to buy supplies in a local supermarket every few days. Some dairy products have been coming in from Israel, while also canned food and such vegetables as tomatoes, cucumbers and eggplant were available, he said, adding, "Most shelves are empty."

Another resident of the Jabaliya refugee camp, Issam, said his two small children had begun to wet their beds almost every night, but with no running water, he had no way to clean their clothing or their sheets.

"The thing I'm afraid of when the war is over and I drive around, is the shock I will feel to see the whole Gaza Strip changed and turned into rubble," said the Gaza City resident on the telephone. (dpa)