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COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — Thousands of civilians waded across a vast lagoon under a hail of rebel gunfire Thursday, breaking out of Sri Lanka’s war zone in a mass exodus that left four civilians dead from Tamil Tiger bullets, the military said.
In the tiny coastal strip they had just fled, unrelenting shelling forced health workers to abandon the only hospital in the area, leaving hundreds of wounded patients begging for food and water, according to a health official in the war zone.
The Red Cross called the fate of the wounded “an unimaginable humanitarian catastrophe.”
