SIRTE - Bullet-ridden cars carrying terrified, ill and hungry civilians crawled out of Muammar Gaddafi's home town on Tuesday as anti-Gaddafi fighters said they were planning a final attack. Government forces who had for three weeks been pinned down by artillery and rocket fire on the eastern edges of Sirte were able to advance several kilometres (miles) into the city on Monday, capturing the southern district of Bouhadi. Commanders of forces loyal to the ruling National Transitional Council (NTC) are now talking of a "final" huge push to take the town as, backed by NATO warplanes, they continue their bombardment of pro-Gaddafi positions inside. Aid agencies say they are concerned about the welfare of civilians inside Sirte, one of the last pro-Gaddafi bastions left in the country, who are trapped by the fighting and running out of food, water, fuel and medicine. Concerns about the humanitarian crisis have focussed on the Ibn Sina hospital. Medical workers who fled Sirte said patients were dying on the operating table because there was no oxygen and no fuel for the hospital's generators. "It's a disaster," a doctor who gave her name as Nada told Reuters as she fled the city on Tuesday. "They are hitting the hospital. Two kids have died there. There is random shooting at the hospital from both sides." On the east of the city on Tuesday, NTC fighters said they were trying to clear a corridor to the hospital but that they were being hampered by pro-Gaddafi snipers. Gaddafi's spokesman, and some civilians leaving Sirte, have blamed NATO bombing and NTC shelling for killing civilians and destroying buildings in the town.
