Israel’s Eradication of Gaza’s Healthcare System (w/ Dr. Feroze Sidhwa) | The Chris Hedges Report
Dr. Feroze Sidhwa's harrowing experiences treating patients in Gaza undoubtedly show that Israel's "war" on Gaza is not a conflict with Hamas—but a full throated attack on the civilian population.
This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.
If anyone can witness the genocide in Gaza with utmost clarity, it would be medical professionals working there. Their accounts continue to be as harrowing as those of journalists and Gazans themselves, stripped of rhetoric and left with only raw truth. Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a general, trauma and critical care surgeon in California, has been to Gaza twice and he joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report.
“There is no serious health system in Gaza anymore,” Sidhwa tells Hedges. Instead, what’s left of hospitals are mere buildings filled with medical professionals stripped of the equipment vital to saving lives, refugees seeking anything more than tents and endless streams of people barely surviving the constant onslaught of bombs.
Sidhwa explains the gut wrenching details of treating people mangled by bombs, children shot in the head and the inability to save people because of the lack of basic equipment. While describing the treatment of a six-year-old boy with severe shrapnel injuries, Sidhwa explains, “In the flagship hospital of any third world country, this kid could have survived. But at Nasser [Medical Complex], we don't have the right types of pressures, the right types of critical care medications and even just simple things like a pediatric ventilator, which just wasn't available. So he died 12 hours later.”
The situation in Gaza, as Sidhwa details, is morbidly bleak:
“I don't know how women who need C-sections will get them. I don't know how people who even just have regular role general surgery problems will be able to get them. I don't know how a kid that has asthma will be able to get albuterol. I don't know how somebody with heart disease will be able to get their medications. Just leaving aside the trauma. And then on top of that…the whole population is being starved. Literally no food has gone into Gaza for six weeks.”
Host
Chris Hedges
Producer:
Max Jones
Intro:
Diego Ramos
Crew:
Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges
Transcript:
Diego Ramos
Transcript
Chris Hedges
Israel during the genocide has repeatedly targeted Gaza’s 36 hospitals, clinics, ambulances and killed over 1,000 medical workers, including over 400 doctors and nurses, many in targeted assassinations. Twenty-two of Gaza’s hospitals are now only partially functioning, chronically short of medicine and basic supplies caused by Israel’s total blockade imposed on March 2 of all humanitarian supplies, including food.
The latest medical facility to be bombed by Israel is the al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, the largest remaining functioning hospital in northern Gaza. Al-Ahli Hospital was treating hundreds of patients when Israel, on short notice, ordered its evacuation. Patients, many critically ill, were carted out to the road. The hospital was then hit by at least two missiles. In October 2023, nearly 500 people were killed in an Israeli air attack on the al-Ahli Hospital.
Israel routinely blames errant rockets launched by armed Palestinian factions for the explosions or claims hospitals are being used as command-and-control centers by Hamas and are therefore legitimate targets. This last claim was made by Israel to justify the most recent missile strike. Israel rarely offers evidence to back up its allegations.
Today we discuss Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza’s health infrastructure with Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a general, trauma and critical care surgeon in California, who recently returned from Gaza.
This is your second trip to work in Gaza. Before we begin with what's happening in Gaza, you should talk about all the roadblocks that are put before medical workers who want to go volunteer to work in the hospitals in Gaza.
Dr. Feroze Sidhwa
Yeah, so the first time I went was March of 2024. And at that time the Rafah crossing hadn't been taken, the border between Gaza and Egypt. So the Egyptians didn't care if you took in a whole bunch of extra supplies because they knew that the hospitals were being starved. There's no regular resupply of the hospitals for surgical equipment, for antibiotics even, just simple things that couldn't possibly be weaponized.
And so I took, if I'm remembering correctly, it was a year ago now, but if I'm remembering right I took about 850 pounds of stuff with me on my British Airways flight. I gave another 250 pounds to another guy who was going, he just lives north of me. And so I alone brought like 1,100 pounds of stuff, all medical stuff. Nothing else.
By the time we left Gaza in two weeks, it was really all gone. I went with [orthopedic surgeon] Mark Perlmutter who took about 700 pounds of orthopedic implants. So yeah, that was a crucial way for physicians, nurses, others to bring things in that are needed because the hospitals just can't get resupplied.
Obviously it's not enough, like individual people can't bring in enough medical equipment for a whole society one person at a time. But it was something. Now, if i'm remembering right, Rafah was taken on May 7th and now the way medical teams, what these are called are EMTs, emergency medical teams. It's a World Health Organization mechanism and so the WHO talks to COGAT [Coordinator of the Government Activities in the Territories] at the Israeli office, that coordinates with humanitarian groups for the IDF.
So the WHO puts together a team. So for me, it was six people or five healthcare workers. And then everybody gets pre-approval from the Israelis. So you get pre-approved. Oh great. I got pre-approval. So you fly to Oman, the capital of Jordan. You have to get there two or three days early. So now you've already taken more than four weeks off of work, which is very difficult for an American physician to do.
I'm very lucky in that I have supportive partners who helped me do that. But you've taken four or five weeks off of work, you fly to Oman and like literally less than 12 hours before you're going across the border you get final approval. Now in my group, just to illustrate how ridiculous this is, in my group, I'm a 43 year old guy, so I'm certainly a man of military age. And I've been perfectly public about what I saw in Gaza, what I did there, what other people have seen.
I've written a New York Times article, I've written a Politico article. So I've been fairly public. I was admitted. Tammy Abu Ghnaim, who was with me, is probably the next most vocal person on the trip. And she was admitted. The people who were denied are a 78 year old pediatrician with two fake knees named John Kahler, who obviously couldn't possibly pose a threat to anybody.
And then an American Army veteran and woman who probably weighs about 105 pounds named Bing. What is the logic? What's the reason behind it? It seems to be quite literally at random.
So, you know, our team didn't have half of the people that we were expecting to have. The hospital didn't have half of the extra staff help that it was expecting to have. It's not as big of a problem as bombs falling out of the sky, but it's clearly just disruption for its own sake.
Chris Hedges
So let's talk about your first trip and your second trip and comparing the two of them and talk about where you were located, what you did, what your day was like. But I'm assuming the second time it must have been even more horrendous than the first time in terms of shortages and power outages and everything else.
Dr. Feroze Sidhwa
Yeah, so the first trip was March 25th to April 8th, if I'm remembering the dates correctly, just two weeks. I was in Khan Yunis at European Hospital, which is on the eastern edge of the city, pretty close to the border zone or the border with Israel. So when we got there, at the time basically all of Gaza's hospitals were also refugee camps or displaced persons camps, however you want to say it. And so not only was the grounds of the hospital, like the hospital campus was a refugee camp, but even inside the hospital, in the hallways, lining every hallway, lining every area that was available were families living in improvised tents.
You know, just some string hanging a sheet from the ceiling so that people could have a little bit of privacy. So there were about 1,500 people living inside the hospital, not patients, just living inside the hospital. And then on top of that, it's a 220-bed facility that had 1,500 people admitted to it. So you can imagine, in this situation, it's not really a hospital anymore.
There's kind of hospital stuff going on, but it's not really a hospital. It's impossible to keep anything clean. You know, women were like draining out canned foods in the ICU sink. It was just, yeah, it was completely ridiculous.
Furthermore, the entire healthcare staff was already either homeless or the ground invasion and the real destruction of Khan Yunis was happening at that time. So it was very unsafe to move from, especially because European Hospital is on the far eastern edge of the city near the border.
It's very dangerous for people to come and go from the hospital. So most of the healthcare staff actually lived in the hospital as well. The OR staff slept in the operating room at night or in the sterile processing facilities. You know, it is just completely ridiculous. So the hospital, truth be told, really just couldn't function like this. And we were able to do some good work, but not much to be perfectly honest.
You know, when I first got there, I did wound care rounds, which took about three days to find everybody in the hospital who had a serious wound. Half of them were small kids.
Chris Hedges
What were the wounds? Describe the wounds.
Dr. Feroze Sidhwa
So the wounds were of different varieties. Some of them were surgical wounds, meaning like they had had a laparotomy, the general surgeon had looked inside their abdomen. And then the wound had become infected afterwards, which virtually every wound did so the skin had to be opened and the pus had to be allowed to drain out.
But then that requires constant wound care going forward. That was probably, I don't know, a third, I'm just guessing, but about a third of them. And the other two-thirds were really serious injuries to the limbs—partial amputations, severe degloving injuries like where the part of a limb is kind of banana peeled off things like that.
And so I found about 250 people, like I said, half of them small kids who needed not just wound care, but actually operative wound care. Like they needed to be taken to an operating room with all the bells and whistles that we have there. Nice lighting, anesthetics, things like that. Well, there's only four operating rooms at European Hospital. How am going to take 250 people to the OR every day? Just me. Like this is completely ridiculous, right?
So what we had to do was actually start taking ketamine. It's an anesthetic that lets you keep breathing. And we had to take that and I just brought a little pulse oximeter, the little thing that tells you how high your oxygen is, that I bought off of Amazon and that was the only monitoring I had.
I would just bring the ketamine out to the regular ward and I would anesthetize people on the ward. I use ketamine in the United States for my patients so it's not like I was doing something I've never done before but this is not the way you do these things properly There's no sterility and even in the operating room, to be honest, there wasn't much sterility, but the ward was obviously much worse.
You know, there's cats walking around. There's no sterility. Little kids are running in and out of the room while we're doing this stuff and every room has three or four times as many people in it as it's supposed to because like I said, 220 bed facility, but with 1,500 people admitted to it.
So it was basically just impossible. You can imagine the hospital just can't function like this. I think quite literally, there might be one or two exceptions, but I think literally every hospital in Gaza has at some point been forcibly evacuated, meaning everyone was told, leave or we'll kill you if you don't leave, which is, evacuation isn't really the right term for that.
And once people were forcibly displaced from the hospital, the hospital administrators usually made the decision not to allow refugees to come back into the hospital itself. The grounds of the hospital are right outside it. That was fine. But they said, look, the hospitals just can't function like this. So when I went to Nasser [Hospital] this time, which is on the western side of Khan Yunis, kind of more in the core of the city, when I went to Nasser Medical Complex, there were no patients inside the hospital.
There were no DPs, no displaced people living in the hospital itself. So the hospital could actually function. So then when I went back to Nasser this time when I was there, March, I guess it was 6th to April 1st, thankfully the hospital was not a DP camp anymore. And so the hospital could actually function. But, I got there on March 6th and like you said, the blockade had been or the cut off of all entry and exit into Gaza of any goods whatsoever had started on March 2nd, so a few days before.
So the hospital can no longer be resupplied with anything. Well, from March 6th, when I was there, until the 18th, we did see trauma cases, maybe one or two surgical cases a day due to trauma, but otherwise the hospital was actually working in its normal elective capacity, fixing hernias, taking out people's gallbladders, things like that. The normal general surgical problems that any of us can, can get at any moment.
So we weren't burning through our supplies in other words, but on March 18th, that's when the bombing campaign restarted. Just that day, literally just that day, that morning, I know because I'm writing a paper about this for a medical journal. Nasser Medical Complex just by itself saw 221 patients just that morning.
Just to give you an idea of how extreme that is, I was a resident during the Boston Marathon bombing. It was a terrorist attack in 2013 in Boston during the marathon and, in that attack, it was in the city of Boston. Boston has six level one trauma centers. If you include Boston Children's Hospital, because it's a pediatric level one trauma center and between them, they have 4,000 beds, right? Nasser Medical Complex with the tent extensions that it has, has 450 beds, so about a tenth.
In all of Boston, all of the level one trauma centers together saw 129 patients that day. Nasser alone saw 221 patients. The differential is just enormous. So you're talking about a huge expenditure of hospital resources and the hospital not only can't be resupplied anymore, but the hospital's warehouse was actually destroyed during the raid on Nasser, which had been a year before I got there. It was actually when I was at European Hospital, they were raiding Nasser Medical Complex about a year ago.
Chris Hedges
How was it destroyed, Feroze?
Dr. Feroze Sidhwa
Yeah, so the hospital has a relatively new building. I think it was built in 2020. It was a dialysis unit on the first and second floors. And then the hospital's warehouse was the third floor. When the Israelis invaded and basically smashed Nasser Hospital to pieces, they went into that building. They found that it was a dialysis center. And then they just burned the whole place. They just set the whole place on fire. You can still see, actually, the burn marks on the outside where the flames came out of the window.
Chris Hedges
When was that? Was that early in the genocide or when was it?
Dr. Feroze Sidhwa
That was in March of 2024. Yeah, so the Israelis raided Nasser Medical Complex in February of 2024. And then again in March of 2024. February, they certainly caused damage and a whole lot of disruption. And I think about half a dozen patients died during that time. And they arrested a whole bunch of people.
But then they came back in March and that's when they really, really destroyed the place. Tore it to shreds, arrested most of the medical staff, buried people in mass graves outside the hospital, burned the warehouse, forced the hospital director, I think his name was Dr. Atef if I remember correctly, he's still there now. Forced him to make a confession sitting in front of Israeli flags in his office. I mean, just completely ridiculous nonsense.
Chris Hedges
And was that mass grave, which I remember reading about, were those mostly patients?
Dr. Feroze Sidhwa
I honestly don't know the answer though. This is sad. There were two mass graves at Nasser Medical Complex. From what I've been told, I haven't read a report about this but from what I've been told, and it makes some sense, the mass graves… So we lived on the fourth floor of the hospital and on the western edge of the hospital grounds right at the… There was a large courtyard that had been a tent encampment.
The Israelis came through—this is a year ago, March of last year—through the tent and through the wall, destroyed the entire tent encampment. And of course, threw everybody out. They then dug a mass grave in that area just inside the wall of the hospital. And from what I'm told, again, I can't verify but from what I'm told, this was filled with bodies mostly from Khan Yunis, actually.
Why? I don't know. I don't know if they had been dug up and the Israelis were looking for hostages or if it was just random brutality for its own sake I really have no idea. So that's looking West, that's on the Western edge. On the southern edge of the hospital compound is a small mosque which is right next to the morgue and the morgue started burying people in a mass grave right where the mosque is now. That mosque wasn't there before. It's just a tent.
They started burying people in a very shallow mass grave there because the Israelis wouldn't allow them to take bodies to the graveyard, which is about 300 meters away from the hospital. So they were burying people there, but they didn't have any equipment. They certainly weren't allowed to dig real graves. So all of these bodies were mangled by animals and things like that.
And then after the Israelis finally withdrew from the hospital, those people were exhumed and then were buried properly in a grave elsewhere.
Chris Hedges
I want to go back to… so the bombing starts on March 18th. That day you have over 200 patients.
Dr. Feroze Sidhwa
221 patients just at Nasser.
Chris Hedges
Describe what it looked like. Describe what you saw.
Dr. Feroze Sidhwa
Yeah, like I mentioned, I was at the Boston Marathon bombing or I was working in a hospital during the Boston Marathon bombing at Boston Medical Center. And that up until March 18th, that was the biggest mass casualty event I had ever seen. But March 18th was a completely different, it wasn't even the same. It seems strange to call both of them mass casualty events. So the bombing started at 2:30 AM.
We were all asleep in the fourth floor hospital living quarters where the emergency medical teams stay. So when some blasts happened close enough that it actually blew the door of our living quarters open, it smashed into the cabinet right behind it and that was what woke us all up, it was incredibly loud and then we realized that the bombing had restarted.
It was just continuous at that point. The whole hospital was shaking. It was incredibly loud. It was like I was back at European Hospital. So we all said we better go down to the emergency room. So we all got dressed, went down to the ER and we went to the front of the hospital. And I have to say when I was at European Hospital, they did not have the ability to triage, to run a mass casualty event properly. Nasser was very different.
The Palestinians are, they really are very good at this. I was pretty shocked by how efficient they were. And just to give you an idea, when we got down there, patients hadn't started arriving yet. Already at the front of the hospital, this is like seven or eight minutes after the bombing started, already at the front of the hospital, the nursing supervisor on call, and Khaled Al Serr, who is one of the, you probably have at least heard his name. He's a general surgeon at Nasser Medical Complex.
He's quite well known because he was imprisoned by the Israelis for six months. And, so Khaled was at the front. Now Khaled is 10 years younger than I am. He finished residency two years ago and residency in the Gaza Strip is not a very robust experience, compared to say like the United States where it's much more structured. Nevertheless, he is out there and he's the one that's going to lead this mass casualty event. And he does so incredibly effectively.
People who are obviously dead, even though their families, you know, decapitated, chest is ripped open, whatever it might be. Their families are obviously begging you, no, no, no, take them in, do something. Do something. No, take them to the morgue. They're dead. Keep driving. Because otherwise the hospital is flooded with dead people and completely uninteresting people who have like a finger injury. Then you just don't have any space to take care of the people who are seriously injured.
So then, he started directing patients into green, yellow and red zones. The red zone is where me and Dr. Morgan McMonagle, he's an Irish trauma surgeon that was there with us. He was with Medical Aid for Palestinians. I was with MedGlobal. He called and said, look, you guys go to the red area and start taking patients up to the OR as you think they need to go. So Morgan and I went to the red area and honestly the first 10 or 15 minutes all we did was pronounce small children dead.
Most of the people in that area were small kids. They're laid out, there were six or seven stretchers in there. I can't remember. I think six. But there's already children laid out all over the floor. So like the first person I found was probably a three or four year old girl. She had… how her head was still attached to her, I really don't know. She just had an incredible number of shrapnel injuries to the head and also some to the neck. And she wasn't breathing properly.
So I jaw thrusted her, just meaning like kind of bringing your… anybody who's done CPR class has learned how to do that. But she still didn't start breathing properly and in a mass casualty event, especially when we don't have a neurosurgeon, that basically means she's going to die. She was still attempting to breathe, but she couldn't. So, then it was because of these brain injuries she had.
So I just picked her up, I gave her to, I assume it was her father, it was some male relative. I gave him to her and I said, take her out there. There's an area they literally, they do this in every hospital in Gaza now. They have to set up an area where patients can just die with their families because they can't be helped.
Their injuries are either too severe for what the hospital can actually provide or it's just, they're so far gone that it would take 10 people all day to possibly save their life, maybe have a five or 10% chance of saving their life. But that means those 10 people aren't working on everybody else who have a 90% chance of survival, you know?
They're called triage decisions and they're not the most fun things, especially when you're dealing with small kids. So then I think there was one other girl that I pronounced dead in the same fashion and then, finally, I found a little five year old girl, I thought she was four at the time and she turned out to be five, who had a single wound right here on the left side of her face.
It turned out that that shrapnel had traveled through her brain, but it had stayed on one side. So that's actually a survivable injury. And other than that, her spleen was bleeding and her left lung was punctured and was bleeding. So I took her upstairs. I took her to the operating room, removed her spleen, put it in a chest tube.
One of the pediatric surgeons actually came in in the middle of the operation. So I handed it off to him and went across, there's a bank of six operating rooms. So just went across and there was a 29 year old woman there named Lobna that one of the residents, Yahya, had brought up to operate on.
Lobna had a hole in her back about maybe a little bit smaller than a bowling ball just above her gluteal cleft, above her butt crack and I don't know what had caused it. I saw two such injuries in Gaza. Actually, one was one of the last people I operated on before I left, but I've never seen an injury like that. This injury, your pelvis has two wings and the bone right in the middle is called the sacrum. It's a very, very dense bone. It attaches your spine to your pelvis. It's very, very thick and dense. It was completely gone.
And there's a fine network of veins that sits right on top of it that were just shredded. I mean, they were just bleeding everywhere and there's nothing surgically that you can do about this. Her vagina was torn, her rectum was torn, her bladder was torn. And so we just basically closed off the rectum because it's dirty and we left everything else alone and we packed her tightly with cotton, with gauze, and we took her to the ICU.
Now in the U.S. or in Israel or in Britain, or actually really any third world country even, where it wasn't true that every single hospital was also experiencing a mass casualty event at the same time, this woman would have lived because all she needed was to be transfused with blood for two or three days until those veins stopped bleeding. Whether or not the big wound in her back could be reconstructed with flaps and things, I honestly don't know, probably not in the context of Gaza.
Elsewhere it certainly could be but because we were in this huge mass casualty event and because there was no way of the hospital getting blood from elsewhere. Like at Boston Med Center during the marathon bombing, if we had started to run out of blood, we would have called you know hospitals in Lowell or in Brookline or like literally just anywhere else and they would just put a whole bunch of blood in an ambulance and driven it to us.
That's obviously not an option because every hospital in Gaza is having a mass casualty event at the same moment. So the blood bank just said look she can only get eight units that's it. But she would have needed like a hundred so she died, she bled to death 12 hours later.
The next kid that we operated on, me and Morgan and one of the Palestinian surgeons as well, was a six year old boy who had two shrapnel injuries to the right side of his heart. His heart actually stopped on the way up to the operating room. Morgan opened his chest, actually was able to sew the holes closed and get his heart restarted just because the kid's so young. He's just physiologically robust. His liver was smashed. His right lung, if I'm remembering correctly, had a huge gash in it that we resected, we just removed that part of the lung basically.
His liver was torn and his stomach, small bowel and colon all had major holes in them. And again, this kid in the flagship hospital, because remember Nasser is the biggest hospital in Gaza right now. Shifa, I know you've been to, I'm pretty sure you've been to Shifa Hospital many times, but Shifa doesn't really exist in any real sense right now. I think there's one operating room that's been set up in a dentist's office or something. It's completely absurd.
So right now, Nasser is the biggest hospital. In the flagship hospital of any third world country, this kid could have survived. But at Nasser, we don't have the right types of pressures, the right types of critical care medications and even just simple things like a pediatric ventilator, which just wasn't available. So he died 12 hours later. And it just kind of went on like this.
One of the last cases I did on that day was a 16 year old boy named Ibrahim. He wasn't bleeding badly, but he had injuries to his rectum and his colon. And as his belly pain got worse, we said, let's take him to the operating room. So we did, opened his abdomen and found those injuries, repaired them, and I gave him a colostomy. And he's the boy that was killed on on March 23rd when the Israelis bombed Nasser to kill some guy named Ismail Barhoum that they don't like.
So basically the last operation I did on March 18th, that kid, he would have gone home on March 24th. But then he was murdered in his hospital bed on March 23rd.
Chris Hedges
Is that because they bombed the hospital?
Dr. Feroze Sidhwa
Yeah on March 23rd, Nasser was bombed directly. The Israelis were quite proud of it. There was no attempt to pretend otherwise So it was March 23rd. It was I think about 8:30 or nine o'clock at night. So I actually, like I said, we lived on the fourth floor of the hospital in the EMT area.
And the men's surgical ward, they divide all the wards between men and women. The men's surgical ward was on the second floor. But the ICU was also on the fourth floor and I have to walk past it to go down there. So after Iftar, the evening meal that Muslims have during Ramadan, after Iftar I was gonna go change Ibrahim's bandages and just explain to his family because he has a colostomy but he's a 16 year old kid. And so just explaining how to take care of it. He was actually a pretty smart kid, he didn't complain about things and he was already changing his own colostomy appliance.
But just to explain to them what's going on, what do you do from here? How does he get better moving forward? Things like that. And as I walked past the ICU, there was a critical care doctor, a Palestinian critical care doctor, I think her name is Hanib. But she was like Feroze, there's this guy over here, Mohammed, he was bleeding. He was just transferred from another hospital. Can you come take a look at him? So I said yeah, sure.
So I went in there, spent about 10 minutes working up Mohammed and we realized he needed to go to the OR. So I said, okay, I told her, you go talk to the anesthesia folks and tell him he needs to go to the OR right away. I'm just going to go change this kid's dressings because who knows how long this operation will take. He’ll be asleep by the time I get out. So I'm going to go change his dressings and then by the time I do that, I'll come back and we'll be in the operating room with Mohammad.
And literally as I walked out of the ICU, that's when Ibrahim's room exploded. The Israelis, I don't know, I don't think they confirmed what they used, but it was probably a drone fired missile. The Palestinian guys who cleaned up the ward afterwards found the munitions remnants and they had a camera on it and stuff. So it was probably a drone fired missile.
But yeah, Ibrahim and this guy that they were trying to kill, Ismail, are from the same family. They're like distant cousins or something. So they were put in the same room because that just makes family visits easier and things like that. And yeah, so this kid was killed in this hospital bed. I was almost killed because I was literally on my way down to be standing right next to him.
Chris Hedges
I want to talk about sniper fire. There's all sorts of reports of children being hit. Of course, you may not have seen it, but snipers shooting children in the head, et cetera. What can you tell me about Israeli sniper fire?
Dr. Feroze Sidhwa
Yeah, so I try to be careful about this. I don't—so like you said, I wouldn't have seen the shooting, right? Because I'm sitting in the hospital waiting for people to come in. So let's talk about my first trip there, European Hospital in March and April of last year and during that time there were ground troops in Khan Yunis and that's where the hospital is located.
And literally quite literally every day I was there, I did 13 days of clinical work there and I saw 13 children shot in the head during that time. I wrote about this in the New York Times and I pulled about 64 other physicians and nurses who'd been in Gaza as well about what they had seen and pretty much everybody saw the same thing because we were there while the ground invasion was active
And yeah, most of us saw…and we're not talking about 17 and a half year old boys, we're talking about small, like preteen children shot in the head or the chest, often with single gunshot wounds to the head or head and the chest. And this was a major, this was constant. I actually, I try to be as conservative as possible with these things. So I actually only talk about the children that I actually recorded in my diary when I was there.
There were entire days where literally I had one pair of gloves available like there were out of gloves or there were no gloves so my hands were just like covered in blood the entire day so I couldn't even grab my phone to write anything down. So I'm sure I actually saw more, I just don't remember. So, it was a huge problem and the reason that I focused on that in The Times and then when I give talks about this and stuff like that, the reason I focused on that is because it kind of illustrates what the Israeli attack is.
Because it's always framed as an Israel-Hamas war, right? Like Mark Perlmutter and I, when we got back, we wrote an article in Politico. And the whole point of this article is to discuss how direct and how clearly directed this attack is at the civilian population of Gaza. Now we don't explicitly discuss, we don't explicitly say that. We just give people the stories and we hope that they can come to their own conclusion.
You used to write for The Times, right? So you know how newspapers work. You don't really choose the headline of your article, that's decided on by editors. You really just don't even have anything to do with that question.
Chris Hedges
I'm often surprised, unpleasantly, surprised.
Dr. Feroze Sidhwa
And you're often shocked by it. And that's exactly what happened here and I just have to give the editor that we worked with for the piece, Teresa, all the credit in the world. I'm sure she didn't choose this headline. She was absolutely phenomenal. But whoever chose this headline made the sub or I don't know what you call the smaller headline right below the headline, but it was “What two surgeons saw in the Israel-Hamas war.”
And we were like, dude, the whole point of this article is that it's not an Israel-Hamas war. It's an attack on the population of Gaza. So that kind of thing was frustrating and that was why I really tried to emphasize that the shooting of children in the head… because it's not like oh I saw it one place and maybe one other. Like you could argue that one child shot in the head was an accident or a crossfire or just some sadistic soldier who's a psychopath.
We have those in our society. I'm sure Palestinians have that too; everybody has that in their society. There are violent crazy people everywhere but when you are talking about in the catchment area of every hospital in the Gaza Strip for more than a year at that point, a child is being shot in the head every day or regularly, meaning almost on a daily basis. That can't possibly be an accident.
The Israeli military is extremely sophisticated. They have body cameras. I've been told a lot of the sniper scopes themselves have cameras. There's obviously cameras on every drone. All of the drones, missiles themselves also have cameras. There's cameras everywhere, they know exactly what's going on.
You know the killing of the Red Crescent workers and civil defense workers recently illustrates it. The Times actually had a good report on it just yesterday, where they talked about how they were shown drone footage and stuff like that. And even the drone footage that the Israelis were showing them contradicted what they were saying, but yeah, so like they know what's going on.
It's not like they don't have any clue who their soldiers are shooting. And furthermore, if you read the Israeli press or if you look at [Israeli non-governmental organization] Breaking the Silence, any of these people, they've all pointed out the same thing. I'm hardly the first person to mention it. That there just are no rules of engagement.
The soldiers can do whatever they want. Well, if that went on for two weeks after October 7th, I think people could at least rationally say, well, they're in a rage. People are just furious. Okay, fine. A month? Two months? Six months? A year? No, that's not believable anymore. Even if the soldiers are still acting out of a rage, the Israeli military has a policy of not doing anything about it at that point, even if it's just by default.
So that was why we focused on that. Now, when I was back… and I'll mention this for two reasons. I didn't see, at least I haven't reviewed my notes since I came back, but I'm pretty sure, I don't believe I ever saw a child shot in the head this time that I was in Gaza.
I saw plenty of people shot by Israelis, but none were children shot in the head. And I think the reason is just because there are no ground troops in Khan Yunis now. There are in the far eastern side of the city, but they would go to European Hospital. They wouldn't come to Nasser Medical Complex. In Khan Yunis proper and on the west, it's almost all bombing.
And in Rafah—because the invasion of Rafah hadn't started when I was there—in Rafah, they were just shooting individual people from this giant sniper tower that they'd built in the Philadelphia corridor. So it’s not the same thing as having ground troops throughout the city who feel like they can do whatever they want and they know they won't be punished for it.
But it also goes back to the idea. Because the only defense that somebody could have, I guess there's maybe two, one is that I'm lying, which doesn't track. Why would I do that?
And even if I'm lying, what about everyone else who saw the same thing? It doesn't, doesn't really make… like, why is John Kahler lying? Why is Adam Hamawy lying? Why is Mark Perlmutter lying? Why is Monica Johnson lying? You know, it doesn't make any sense.
So there's that. But the second thing that people could say is, you just don't realize they were shot by Hamas, not by the Israelis. Well, okay. That seems like it would require the grandest conspiracy of all time to actually accomplish.
Like not one Palestinian has pointed out that no it was Hamas that shot my kid. Like a 100,000 people are thought to have fled Gaza since this started not one of them has thought… I mean imagine what a celebrity that person would become. All their problems would be solved in life. They'd get all sorts of money from AIPAC for the rest of their life. Not one person, I mean just imagine it. They'd be set for life. These are poor people living like refugees, you know? Not one person has said this because it isn't true.
It's just completely ridiculous. Again, could Hamas accidentally have shot a kid in a crossfire? That's possible. Could there be some Hamas lunatic who shot a kid thinking, ah, this is what's going to solve the Israel-Palestine problem? Yeah, that's possible. But it doesn't explain the pattern. It doesn't explain the longevity of the pattern. It doesn't explain the intensity. These are silly arguments, you know? So that's why we focused on it.
The last point I was going to make is that, this idea that it's Hamas shooting these people, well then why when there are no Israelis—there's plenty of Hamas people in Khan Yunis, at least I assume there are—why aren't kids still getting shot in the head? It’s just totally ridiculous.
Chris Hedges
How did you handle wounded fighters? Did you put them in… How did that work? So if somebody came in…
Dr. Feroze Sidhwa
Never saw one.
Chris Hedges
Oh really?
Dr. Feroze Sidhwa
No, I never saw one. I have to admit that this is a minority position, what I'm about to say. But virtually no one, and I'd encourage you to ask other people who've worked there, virtually no one has ever encountered somebody that they were sure was a fighter. When I was at European, the week before I got there, people told me that there was one guy who came in with an entourage of other guys.
And it was kind of obvious that they were militants. And this guy, I think he had a partial amputation of his arm or something and they didn't come in armed, but it was obvious who they were. But they didn't get aggressive with people. They just said, tell us what you need, they said, we need this, this, and this. They went and got it. They brought it back. They did an operation and then they just whisked the guy out of the hospital almost immediately.
But that was literally the only person that I ever, the only male I should say, that I ever encountered who didn't come in with their family. People can say whatever they want about Hamas but nobody thinks they're dragging their wives out to the battlefield like that's completely ridiculous. You know Hamas films a lot of its operations against Israeli forces and that's just not what's happening.
Nor did the Israelis even claim it is. They claim that they're using them as human shields when they're at home eating dinner, you know? So yeah, no, honestly, I never saw a combatant. There was one, it was probably March 8th or 9th before the ceasefire ended, in other words. I saw a pickup truck with two guys in the kind of typical Hamas garb—the face covered, the vest, the kind of military looking vest sort of thing and with rifles of some kind, literally just enter the hospital gate, drive through and exit the other gate.
That was it. They were on the hospital property for like eight seconds. Like quite literally. Because I looked, I was like, oh my God, I've never… they're gone. Okay. It's like they came in on accident or something.
Chris Hedges
Well, because Israel is always making this charge that hospitals are command and control centers.
Dr. Feroze Sidhwa
No, it's absurd, yeah.
Chris Hedges
They have these underground tunnel complexes, not that they've ever been able to provide any evidence. I want to talk about what's happening. I mean, so March 2nd, everything's cut off, including medical supplies. The last desalination plant, because they've cut electricity, is not producing clean water.
Of course, you have certainly malnutrition, if not cases of starvation, all sorts of diseases that come with having unclean water and camping next to fetid pools of open sewage, et cetera. What's happening to the health system? What do you see happening? I mean, at a certain point, it's gonna have to shut down.
Dr. Feroze Sidhwa
Yeah, I hate saying this because I respect my Palestinian colleagues deeply and they're doing everything they can. There is no serious health system in Gaza anymore. You know, like I said, Nasser is the flagship hospital in Gaza. And everything that I did at Nasser Medical Complex to save people's lives, I could do in my house. If you just gave me a knife and some suture and an anesthetic machine. I mean this literally.
There's nothing else going on. I keep mentioning Mark Perlmutter. He's a Jewish-American hand surgeon, orthopedic surgeon that I've been to Gaza with twice now. He talked about how he was actually having to implant not pins but drill bits themselves into children's bones in order to fixate them because they just don't have pins that are the size needed for children.
There's no way to do anything. Trauma surgery is really the most basic part of surgery. The goal is to stop people from bleeding to death, that's it. That doesn't require a whole lot of fancy equipment because you just don't have time to use it, right? That's just not what it is.
So for me, I wasn't out of… like I said, if I have a scalpel and I have even one type of suture, I can do the vast majority of things I need to, but that's not real medical care. You know, real medical care is putting people back together. And it's just not possible. It's not doable at all. And that's leaving a site like you mentioned the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Northern Gaza, it basically doesn't exist anymore.
I mean, like part of the building is still standing, that's true. And doctors can walk back into it if they want to, but there's no supplies. There's nothing there. There's absolutely nothing there. And the same is true of the vast majority of hospitals in Gaza. There is just nothing there. You know, even the ones that are standing, that are still physically, the building still physically exists, just because doctors are inside a building, that doesn't make it a hospital.
And like you said, nothing has gotten through since March 2nd. So we're going on six weeks now. And the entire strip has been in a mass casualty event continuously since then. So yeah, I can't imagine that the healthcare system can function for more than another month or so. I just, don't… I mean like function at all, like literally in any capacity.
I don't know how women who need C-sections will get them. I don't know how people who even just have regular role general surgery problems will be able to get them. I don't know how a kid that has asthma will be able to get albuterol. I don't know how somebody with heart disease will be able to get their medications. Just leaving aside the trauma. And then on top of that, like you mentioned, the whole population is being starved. Literally no food has gone into Gaza for six weeks.
And the entire local food production system has been destroyed. The only place you can actually grow food in Gaza right now is in the sand. Because Gaza is basically fertile to the east of the Salah al-Din Road, right in the middle of the territory, and not fertile to the west of it, nearer to the ocean. But the Israelis are occupying everything east of the Salah ad-Din Road now. So you can't even grow food except in the sand. Maybe some cucumbers will grow outside your tent or something.
That's where people are getting food now. And actually, it's not even like it just started happening. Like we said, the cutoff of any entry of anything into Gaza started on March 2nd. I got there on March 6th, and we ate meat that day. Now, I don't really care about eating meat, but it's just to illustrate, because this is a meat-eating culture. I ate meat that day, and then we didn't eat any, I mean, no meat, no chicken, no fish, no kind of animal protein until I think it was like March 29th when somebody found some chicken somehow.
And we're Westerners, we have all the money in the world compared to everybody else, but there's just none of this available. You know what I mean? It just literally isn’t available. I think Mark told me that at one point, because he went up to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the, town just north of Khan Yunis called Deir al-Balah. He went up there and I think he told me he paid $7 for a can of tuna. Now someone might say, well, that was somebody taking advantage of him, but no, he had a local go get it for him.
And it was $7. When I was walking around the market that was right outside of Nasser Medical Complex, it's actually exactly where that, I'm sure you saw the video of that poor journalist being burned alive in his tent. That tent was literally right outside of the Nasser Medical Complex. I had hung out with those journalists many times in that tent. I didn't know that particular fellow, but yeah. But walking around in that little market, the eggs when I got there, so just four days after the blockade started, when I got there, eggs were about 50 cents each, which is what I pay for like nice organic eggs in California.
Obviously nobody there can afford that. When I left, it was more than $2 an egg. I think they were asking for nine shekels per egg. There's no possible way that anybody can afford, actually I guess that's even closer to $3 an egg actually.
There's just no way. There's no way for people to obtain even food, which of course means they are much much more vulnerable to traumatic injuries, to infections afterwards. Pregnant women once they give birth can't breastfeed. So their infants are dying. It's not really well appreciated how severe the starvation problem is in Gaza.
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) is the technical group that monitors food insecurity in the world. Their last report on Gaza, I think came out two months ago if I remember, or maybe maybe last month. But there, I just did the calculations yesterday or the day before. So I might have the numbers not exactly correct, but it's approximately something like this. If their classifications of people, they classify households into different phases of food insecurity.
And given how many people are in class five, class four, class three, those are the three classes where mortality actually increases. If there are estimates of who's in which category are correct, there should be about 140 people dying of starvation-related causes every day in Gaza. And that's actually an underestimate because Gaza is an unusually heavily child population. And children under the age of five are much more vulnerable to starvation than anybody else, especially newborns, obviously.
And then, their projections, because the IPC reports usually say what happened before this report came out and what do we expect to happen afterwards. If their projections are correct, it's almost 200 people a day that are going to start dying of starvation-related causes in Gaza. And, you know, the story of starvation in Gaza is not a well understood one. The extreme nature of how hungry Gaza has been for the past 18 months at this point, it is not something that has been widely reported on.
Chris Hedges
And the other issue is, you know, anecdotally from Palestinians I know who have family in Gaza, many of them are not listed as dead. They just haven't heard from them for months. So I've got to believe that the numbers of dead are far, far higher than the roughly 50,000 put out by the Ministry of Health.
Dr. Feroze Sidhwa
Yeah. So in October, me and 98 other healthcare professionals wrote an open letter to the Biden administration. When Trump was elected, I modified it and sent it to him too, through contacts in his campaign. But in that letter, we wrote an appendix. If anybody wants to read it, it's at GazaHealthcareLetters.org. Basically I wrote an appendix, in which, again, looking at the IPC’s reports on Gaza up until that point, which was September of 2024, it was basically impossible to estimate that fewer than 62,000 people had starved to death in Gaza.
The technical term is “died of starvation related causes,” but I mean, they mean the same thing to most people. And now I do want to say that the leading historian of famine is a guy named Alex de Waal, he's at the Tufts [University] World Peace Institute or something like that.
He disagrees. He doesn't think that the numbers are that high, but he says that there's no way it's under 10,000. Let me not misquote him. He says that it is almost certainly 10,000 or more. So, there's two things with that. Number one, the moral—I don't know, I'm not very good with English— but the moral dastardliness of oh well, it's only 10,000 who cares?
Like, no, starving 10,000 people to death is a shocking crime. But it kind of tells you something about ourselves that we don't even know to within an order of magnitude how many people we've starved to death in Gaza, most of whom will have been small children. Like that's terrifying. So that's one major cause of mortality that's not reported.
The second is what we were talking about a minute ago. I am quite sure that very, very few combatants are actually counted in the Ministry of Health calculation, or not calculation, the Ministry of Health reporting. Every time The Times or the BBC, any of them report, say “the Hamas Ministry of Health says 51,000 people have died. However, they do not distinguish between combatants and civilians.”
Now that's technically accurate because that's not how hospitals do things like I'd never asked anybody, “Excuse me, sir. Are you a combatant or a civilian?” This is ridiculous. Medical care is provided to all people including soldiers. Like the oldest part, the first Geneva Convention is from 1864. I mean, you probably know this better than I do but it's from 1864 and it's specifically about the care and the protection afforded to wounded combatants not civilians. So wounded combatants have, since before the American Civil War was over, have been protected people under international law.
It doesn't matter who they are. You take care of people who need to be taken care of and that's regardless of their national affiliation, right? Like if an Israeli soldier comes into the hospital for some reason I'll take care of him too. Honestly, if Benjamin Netanyahu comes in, I'll take care of him. I don't really want to to be honest, but I'd still do it because that's what being a doctor is.
But yeah, so I very seriously doubt that anyone who was actually, not anybody, but very, very few people who were actually participating in combat have been brought to civilian hospitals in Gaza. And there's a few reasons. I mean, number one, almost everybody that I have ever seen in the hospital came in with their family. They were all wounded together. And like I said, Hamas is just not dragging their kids and their wives out to the battlefield.
But number two, Hamas is engaged, not just Hamas, all the Palestinian armed groups are engaging Israeli soldiers in these areas that are already severely bombed out, destroyed, et cetera, et cetera. If one of them gets shot, I don't see how they could even possibly recover him. I mean, I'm no military expert, I don't want to pretend I am, but the Israelis, when they're directing heavy loads of gunfire or tank shelling or whatever at a combatant in the middle of an actual, not just bombing the crap out of helpless people, but an actual armed confrontation, I just cannot imagine the scenario where they survive long enough to get trucked over to Nasser Medical Complex. Yeah, no, he has, it's a great example actually, yeah.
Chris Hedges
Well, this is with Yahya Sinwar. He was wounded. Pretty badly wounded, and the drone found him and killed him.
Dr. Feroze Sidhwa
Yeah, well it's a pretty good example. Sinwar is a good example, because he was walking around, they claimed he was spending his billions of dollars in a tunnel or something, but he was walking around, they encountered Israeli troops. I think his arm was blown off by a tank shelling, and this is in Rafah, right? So then he makes his way into a bombed out building, like you said, a drone finds him, and then a tank shells again because they just thought he was some random guy.
But yeah when the Israelis are actually confronted by anyone who presents any possible threat to them, the level of violence somehow increases even further compared to the violence that's being used against civilians. So I just have a hard time believing it. Again I'm not a military expert. If somebody were to explain to me why I'm wrong, I'm happy to listen but I cannot imagine. Like I said, literally the only story I have heard from any—and I've asked people before—the only story I've ever heard was that one guy who came in with that arm injury that I mentioned.
That is the only combatant I know that anyone has encountered in a hospital in Gaza. And again, I should say suspected combatant, but probably was. But that's it. That's it. And so I'm sure that these people are being just buried and then Hamas is going on with its life. But secondly, there's a huge number of civilians who have definitely… the way that these Hamas numbers, right, the Ministry of Health, first of all, the Ministry of Health is not actually run by Hamas.
It's actually one of the only things in Gaza that's run jointly by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. But those numbers come specifically from hospital databases of who died. I've looked at the electronic database at Nasser Medical Complex. It's very simple. It's very straightforward. Category seven means people who were injured in the… they categorize patients. Category seven is people who were injured specifically in the context of conflict.
So bombing, shooting, whatever. Not I got beat up in a family dispute, not like that. So specifically that context of violence. They call it, it's category seven. And then category 63 is people who were killed in that context. All the Ministry of Health is reporting is the reports that they get from hospitals on a daily or weekly basis, I'm not honestly sure, probably a daily basis, of category 63. And then they're reporting category seven is the injured, that's it.
There's no way that everybody in Gaza is conspiring to inflate this number. So the important thing to realize is that it's only people who have been delivered to hospital morgues. Like when I was in Khan Yunis, the first time, when I was at European Hospital, I did, and I mean this seriously, I did one hemorrhage control operation. Like in other words, I stopped one person from bleeding to death while I was there in two weeks. And the reason, again, was because there were ground troops in Khan Yunis.
It just wasn't possible to move people quickly to a hospital. If your house is bombed, or if your neighborhood is in lockdown because there are Israeli troops and your kid or your wife or your husband or whoever is shot, and then three days later you'd be able to take them to the hospital just so that they can be pronounced… you know they're dead, they've been dead for days. Why would you make that dangerous trip over to the hospital? What, just so I can include one more person in my death count? No, of course not. You're just going to bury them and move on.
Chris Hedges
And the other thing is you have whole apartment blocks obliterated and everyone inside are killed and you can't dig them out. I mean this happened to a friend of mine, his wife's sister and her family.
Dr. Feroze Sidhwa
Really? Yeah, no, and actually when you drive around, you'll see graffiti all over the place on buildings that says “Osama is buried here. Muhammad is buried here.” It's just everywhere. It's literally everywhere and the civil defense has been estimating 10,000 people are under the rubble since January of last year, you know? I mean it's just completely… if Theodore Postol he's MIT's leading missile technology expert from what I understand.
He's a Jewish fellow and just so people understand where he's coming from. He's a Jewish fellow and he classifies… when he talks about the October 7th attacks, he describes those attacks as having been genocidal. Like he thinks they were, that was the intent of them, which is, I don't agree with him, but that's fine. That's his perspective. He himself just casually said, and he's not saying it carelessly, I don't mean to say it that way, but he just casually estimates that at least hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in Gaza by bombing.
He says, just look at the place. What are you talking about? How could hundreds of thousands of people not have been killed in this bombing? Gazans have, again, you know this better than I do, Gazans have a very long history of surviving under bombardment. So they may have an unusual propensity for surviving such circumstances, but everything has a limit, you know?
Just in case people are interested in these data points. The Lancet, it might have been the Lancet Open or the actual Lancet, I can't remember but the Lancet is a prestigious British medical journal. At least a few months ago, maybe more than that, they published a paper which is not really a study, there's no statistics involved. The paper was done by researchers, if I'm remembering correctly in Japan, Canada, and maybe the United States also, I think at Yale, but I could be, I could be wrong. But anyway, a big international team and what they did was they got the raw data from the Ministry of Health in Gaza, not the aggregate data, but literally line by line, person by person, name, birthday, ID number, everything. They got the entire database up until the point where they got it.
Then, they looked through internationally, kind of like Airwars does, they look through international news reports and then they also looked at social media postings and they spent god knows how much time just correlating each and every one of these records saying is it possible that Mohammed so-and-so killed on this day who is this age, in this location…?
Literally just cross referencing each and every one of these things. They found that the Ministry of Health Numbers under report even publicly verifiable deaths by about 40 percent, right? 40 percent. So that's one major thing. But the other thing that I would encourage people to do is to look at Airwars. Airwars is a British NGO which basically looks at the impact that modern military, especially Air Force, bombing campaigns have on civilians.
Now they wrote one of the most shocking reports I've ever read in my life about just the first 24 days of the Israeli bombing campaign in Gaza. So not the restarting, not March 18th. I'm talking about October 7th to October 31st, excuse me, of 2023. In that less than one month, the same number of children, 1,900, can be verified to have been killed. The same number of children as in the entire most deadly year for children in another conflict that they had ever found, which was Syria in 2016, if I'm remembering the year right.
In 24 days in Gaza, a territory of 2.2 million people, the same number of children were killed as in the deadliest year in conflict that they had ever found previously, which was Syria, which is a much, much larger country. I actually don't know Syria's population, maybe you do, that's insane. This is completely insane.
It's hard to explain sometimes to people, not that you need to explain, what has been done to Gaza over the past 18 months is quite literally unique. There's nothing of this intensity and magnitude and duration has ever been done, especially not to a territory this small. You know, the destruction of Germany during World War II doesn't even come close.
The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic weapons doesn't even come close. It's crazed. The level of violence that has been inflicted in this place is completely insane. It's just beyond anything that anyone has ever seen anywhere else before. And there's a reason for that. It's not Israel attacking Gaza, it's the United States using Israel's army to attack Gaza in any practical sense.
Chris Hedges
Yeah, of course.
Dr. Feroze Sidhwa
Well, yeah, when you send the entire weight of the American military to bomb a completely helpless civilian population, which is half children and now living in improvised shelters, not even in the concrete shelters that they were living in before, this is exactly what's gonna happen. It's hardly surprising. And so like you said, the death toll is certainly far, far, far higher.
And I honestly wouldn't be surprised if it's nearly an order of magnitude off from reality. Can't prove it because there's no data available because the Israelis won't let anybody collect data. It is just an unbelievably... This event will be studied for a long time if humans are still around to do it. And I don't think we're going to come out looking very good at the end of this.
Chris Hedges
No, thank you very much, Feroze. I want to thank Diego [Ramos], Thomas [Hedges], Max [Jones], and Sofia [Menemenlis], who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack.com.
Photos
Gaza Comes Under Sustained Bombardment By Israel After Hamas Attacks
GAZA CITY, GAZA - OCTOBER 11: Explosion and smoke caused by Israeli air raids seen on October 11, 2023 in Gaza City, Gaza. (Photo by Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images)
Healthcare workers in Khan Yunis show support for their colleagues in other regions of the Gaza Strip
KHAN YUNIS, GAZA - NOVEMBER 13: Healthcare workers at the Nassr Hospital gather to show support for their colleagues who continue their duties with limited resources and under difficult conditions at the hospitals in other regions of the Gaza Strip, on November 13, 2023 in Khan Yunis, Gaza. (Photo by Abed Zagout/Anadolu via Getty Images)
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TOPSHOT - People check the destruction in the aftermath of an Israeli strike on the Al-Ahli hospital, also known as the Baptist or Ahli Arab hospital, in Gaza City on April 13, 2025. Gaza's civil defence agency said an Israeli airstrike destroyed parts of the hospital early on April 13, after Israel seized a corridor in the war-battered Palestinian territory and said it planned to expand its military offensive. (Photo by Omar AL-QATTAA / AFP) (Photo by OMAR AL-QATTAA/AFP via Getty Images)
Israeli Airstrike Hits Elementary School
GAZA CITY, GAZA -SEPTEMBER 25: A wounded palestinian man arrives at the Al-shifa hospital after he was injured when an Israeli air strike September 25, 2005 in Gaza City, in the Gaza Strip. (Photo by Abid Katib/Getty Images) *** Local Caption ***
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Israeli army targets displaced Palestinian tents in Deir al Balah
DEIR AL BALAH, GAZA - NOVEMBER 09: Palestinian people are seen around the tents of displaced civilians after the Israeli army targeted them in al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, Gaza on November 09, 2024. Casualties and injuries were reported in the attack. (Photo by Ali Jadallah/Anadolu via Getty Images)
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Ambulances carrying victims of Israeli strikes crowd the entrance to the emergency ward of the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City on October 15, 2023. Israel embarked on a withering air campaign against Hamas militants in Gaza after they carried out a brutal attack on Israel on October 7 that left more than 1,400 people killed in Israel. (Photo by Dawood NEMER / AFP) (Photo by DAWOOD NEMER/AFP via Getty Images)
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13 September 2023, Palestinian Territories, Gaza City: Palestinians crowd inside a mortuary of a hospital, following an explosion at the Israel-Gaza border fence. Photo: Mohammed Talatene/dpa (Photo by Mohammed Talatene/picture alliance via Getty Images)
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TOPSHOT - Palestinians try to put out a fire at the emergency department of the Nasser hospital after it was hit in an Israeli airstrike, in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on March 23, 2025. (Photo by AFP) (Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images)
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TOPSHOT - Smoke plumes billow after an explosion during Israeli bombardment in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on October 18, 2023. A blast ripped through a hospital in war-torn Gaza killing hundreds of people late on October 17, sparking global condemnation and angry protests around the Muslim world. Israel and Palestinians traded blame for the incident, which an "outraged and deeply saddened" US President Joe Biden denounced while en route to the Middle East. (Photo by SAID KHATIB / AFP) (Photo by SAID KHATIB/AFP via Getty Images)
Morgan P. McMonagle
Khaled Al Serr
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TOPSHOT - A Palestinian man is comforted as he weeps next to a truck carrying the bodies of the victims of Israeli overnight airstrikes before transporting them from the Indonesian Hospital in Beit Lahia in northern Gaza for burial on March 18, 2025. (Photo by BASHAR TALEB / AFP) (Photo by BASHAR TALEB/AFP via Getty Images)
An Israeli sniper seen setting up position during a protest...
SOUTH HEBRON HILLS, HEBRON, PALESTINE - 2016/10/13: An Israeli sniper seen setting up position during a protest in the South Hebron Hills. The West Bank in Palestine has been occupied by Israel since 1967. Military checkpoints, blockades, searches, shootings and house demolitions are all part of daily life in the occupied territories. (Photo by Ryan Ashcroft/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
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A CCTV camera over the wall separting Israel and the West Bank in Bethlehem. On Thursday, March 5, 2020, in Bethlehem, Palestine (Photo by Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
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TOPSHOT - Firefights battle flames in a building hit by an Israeli strike in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on December 9, 2023. (Photo by AFP) (Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images)
Hamas Militants Celebrate Israeli Pullout From Gaza
RAFAH REFUGEE CAMP, GAZA STRIP - AUGUST 24: Masked Palestinian militants from the military wing of the Hamas movement participate in celebrations for the Israeli pullout from Gaza on August 24, 2005 at the Rafah refugee camp in southern Gaza Strip. (Photo by Abid Katib/Getty Images)
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TOPSHOT - This aerial view shows tents used as temporary shelters for displaced Palestinians along a street covered with stagnant wastewater in Deir el-Balah in the central Gaza Strip on July 19, 2024, as smoke rises from Israeli bombardment in nearby Nuseirat. (Photo by Bashar TALEB / AFP) (Photo by BASHAR TALEB/AFP via Getty Images)
Dr. Mark Perlmutter
Screenshot from Palestinian American Medical Association YouTube:
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TOPSHOT - People inspect the damage in a room following Israeli bombardment at Nasser hospital in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on December 17, 2023, amid ongoing battles between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas. (Photo by STRINGER / AFP) (Photo by STRINGER/AFP via Getty Images)
Alex De Wal
Alex de Waal, Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation and Research Professor at Tufts University https://www.flickr.com/photos/ifpri/24663884296 (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) | Photo Credit: Milo Mitchell / International Food Policy Research Institute / 2016
Yahya Sinwar, head of the Palestinian Islamic movement Hamas...
GAZA, PALESTINE - 2023/04/14: Yahya Sinwar, head of the Palestinian Islamic movement Hamas in the Gaza Strip, waves his hand to the crowd during the celebration of International Quds Day in Gaza City. (Photo by Yousef Masoud/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Theodore Postol
Screenshot from Democracy Now YouTube
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A picture taken from the Israeli side of the border with the Gaza Strip shows smoke rising behind destroyed buildings in the norther-western part of the Palestinian enclave during an Israeli bombing on October 21, 2023, amid the ongoing battles between Israel and Hamas. (Photo by Aris MESSINIS / AFP) (Photo by ARIS MESSINIS/AFP via Getty Images)
Evacuation of civilians in Aleppo
ALEPPO, SYRIA - DECEMBER 15: A convoy including busses and ambulances, wait at a crossing point at Amiriyah District of Aleppo Syria on December 15, 2016 to evacuate civilians, trying to flee from East Aleppo where had been under siege by Iran led Shiite militias and Assad Regime forces. (Photo by Jawad al Rifai/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
The psychotic assembly of mass murderers called "Israel" will pay for its many crimes. There is simply no way such barbarism can be allowed in the 21rst Century without consequences. The pictures and stories out of Gaza and the West Bank are beyond horrifying. Humanity at its very worst.
Although most if not all Hedges’ readers already knew this is true, I was still struck by Dr. Sidhwa’s laying this massacre directly on the United States. It belongs there, but it is shocking and deeply shameful.