Mother Jones illustration; courtesy Dr. Feroze Sidhwa
Dr. Feroze Sidhwa has volunteered as a trauma surgeon in Ukraine, Haiti, Burkina Faso, and Ghana. But when he went to Gaza in March and April of this year, it changed him. Sidhwa had never seen so much horror in his life.
“There’s nothing like Gaza right now,” he said. “Almost 100 percent of Gaza’s population is homeless and displaced…does that sound like a place where people are going to survive?”
With international journalists banned from Gaza and Palestinian journalists openly targeted by the Israeli military, international medical aid workers have become some of the few people able to tell the world about the toll of the war.
Sidhwa has spent the past six months speaking widely about his time in Gaza. He went to the Uncommitted movement panel at the Democratic National Convention, wrote an article for Politico about what he’s seen, and organized a group of nearly 100 doctors to sign a letter to President Joe Biden begging him to stop sending weapons.
When the New York Times approached Sidhwa to write for its opinion section about what he saw in Gaza—widespread starvation, collapsed sanitary systems—he took it as an opportunity. He went beyond writing from his own experience and corroborated his account with 64 other doctors. In particular, he was haunted by something he saw again and again: children shot in the head.
“Nearly every day I was there, I saw a new young child who had been shot in the head or the chest, virtually all of whom went on to die,” he wrote. At first, he thought this was an anomaly, the work of “a particularly sadistic soldier located nearby.” But when he asked other health care workers, he found that dozens were seeing the same thing.
After his essay in the Times was published, prominent right-wing accounts on X and Instagram, as well as publications like the New York Sun and Israel Hayom, began insisting that the CT images included in Sidhwa’s essay—showing bullets embedded in children’s skulls—had been photoshopped and that Sidhwa was a propagandist desperate for the fall of Israel.
The New York Times did something unusual in response: It released an editors’ note defending its own fact-checking process. “While our editors have photographs to corroborate the CT scan images, because of their graphic nature, we decided these photos—of children with gunshot wounds to the head or neck—were too horrific for publication,” Times editor Kathleen Kingsbury wrote. “We made a similar decision for the additional 40-plus photographs and videos supplied by the doctors and nurses surveyed that depicted young children with similar gunshot wounds.”
Sidhwa found the pushback odd. “I don’t really care about Palestinian nationalism. In fact, I don’t really care about any nationalism as a concept,” he told me. The issue, he said, is simpler than that: “My government, meaning me, is involved in major crimes, and I don’t want that.”
On October 18, as reported by the Washington Post, Israel banned six medical aid organizations—including the Palestinian American Medical Association (PAMA), which Sidhwa has worked with—from entry to Gaza going forward. The WHO received no explanation from Israel as to why.
I spoke with Sidhwa by Zoom between surgeries about his work in Gaza, his advocacy since then, and why he’s still hoping—even now—that the US government might be pressured to change course.
Let’s go back to before all the media attention. How did you end up going to Gaza?
So a very large number of physicians, and especially surgeons, have been killed and probably about an equal number have fled.
Mark Perlmutter, he was involved in a telemedicine project with Gazans. He’s an orthopedic surgeon. He was looking at pre- and post-op X-rays, and he was like, “What on earth is this stuff? Who’s doing these operations?” He found out it was just junior residents or sometimes medical students. And he asked, “Where’s your attending?” And they said, “Well, he’s dead.”
We said: Well, we will go provide that service.
I was at European Hospital from March 25 to April 8. At that time, European Hospital was easily the best-resourced city block in all of Gaza—and it was still a total disaster. There were 10,000 to 15,000 people sheltering on the grounds of the hospital. I walked the hospital grounds several........