On October 30, 2025 OBI's Health Disparities Cluster in partnership with the Medical Anthropology Program and The Berkeley Center for Social Medicine hosted Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a trauma surgeon based in California's Central Valley, to present a talk on cases he treated during two visits to Gaza in 2024 and earlier this year. He highlighted three patients he treated: a young girl, around 9 years old, named Joury, who was severely wounded in an Israeli bombing two weeks prior and who was dying of septic shock. The second was a 29-year-old surgical nurse, Tamer, who was shot by an Israeli soldier in a hospital operating room for refusing to leave his patients when ordered to evacuate the hospital, and then later abducted by soldiers and tortured in an Israeli prison for 45 days. And the last case was that of a 16-year-old boy, Ibrahim, who was recovering from a bombing several days earlier, when Israeli forces bombed his hospital room and killed him. Dr. Sidhwa barely escaped death in that bombing, saying he was headed to check on the boy when the bombing hit. Beyond discussing the nature of the cases, Dr. Sidhwa provided background on the political history of Gaza to contextualize what led up to the genocide, and challenged his audience to take action to change the appalling conditions imposed on Palestinians with American support.
Transcript
Nora Jacobsen Ben Hammed:
I wish to begin by welcoming everyone and extending my sincere gratitude that each of you are here for this extremely important event. It is not the only one of its kind, particularly with the recent establishment of the Palestinian and Arab Studies Program at Berkeley. We have had a wealth of events on Palestine this semester. The quality of campus talks and the continued presence of engaged audience is a testament to this community, but there is perhaps something notably different about this particular event. In an institution such as Berkeley, we are used to speaking about the world in theoretical abstractions that are rich and complex, but also provide a comforting degree of removal from reality as it is lived and experienced.
Today, we won't be afforded that comfort. We are each here to witness, through Dr. Sidhwa, the visceral cases that are the result of the relentless genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza over the last two years, as it has been lived in blood and tears, in permanently disabled bodies and shattered psyches, in lives saved and corpses interred or lost under the rubble. And we do so in a context in which it is still dangerous to assert the very existence of that reality, of naming genocide as genocide, of naming Palestine as a real place with real people who very much have a right not only to live but to flourish. The Arabic language itself attests, in its very structure, to the importance of witnessing. The verbal root sh-ha-da means, in its most basic form, to witness.
But in its most complex form, is-tsh-ha-da, the verb means not only to call as witness, but also, in its passive tense, to be martyred. In this case, to witness the reality of something occurs not by words, but by one's very annihilation. Shahid is both the word for witness and for martyr. To testify to the truth of what one has seen is, it seems, a matter of life and death. I will leave it to Dr. Denise Herd, who will introduce Dr. Faro Sidhwa, to speak more to his work. But I will say, as a co-organizer of the event, and I'm sorry, this will embarrass you, that Dr. Sidhwa refused to take compensation for his trip. He refused reimbursement for his gas and refused honorarium for his valuable time.
The act of providing testimony is part and parcel, it seems, of his mission as a humanitarian physician. I want to thank my co-organizers, both professors in the School of Public Health, Mienah Zulfakar Sharif and Rachel Morello-Frosch. The full success of this event is entirely due to the commitment of these wonderful colleagues. Secondly, it is important, I think, to not only thank but also underscore the significance of the sponsors of Dr. Sidhwa's talk. These include the Othering and Belonging Institute's Health Disparities Cluster, the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, the Center for Social Medicine, and Berkeley's Medical Anthropology Program.
I especially want to thank OBI for taking on the bulk of this work, and in particular, the time and attention of Marc Abizeid and the support of Dr. Denise Herd. This event simply would not have had the level of reach and success without the staff time, tech, and funding from OBI. If you have questions for Dr. Sidhwa, please write them down on the cards that Erfan Moradi has passed out to you. You may also thank him on your way out for the beautiful publicity that he put together. Mienah and I will be going through the questions to moderate the post-talk Q&A. Lastly, I want to welcome Dr. Herd to further introduce Dr. Sidhwa. Denise Herd is a professor of public health at UC Berkeley and the associate director of the Othering and Belonging Institute.
She was the founding director of the Institute's Diversity and Health Disparities Research Cluster. Dr. Herd is a medical anthropologist who has trained at UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley. Her scholarship centers on racialized disparities in health outcomes, spanning topics as varied as historical and contemporary social movements among African Americans, racial and ethnic differences in drinking and drug use patterns, the impact of corporate targeting and marketing on popular culture, racial politics and COVID-19, and policing and health disparities. In addition to her extensive scholarship in public health, Dr. Herd served as Associate Dean at UC Berkeley School of Public Health for seven years. Thank you.
Denise Herd:
Thank you so much, Nora, for your kind words in that wonderful introduction and welcome. I am just so honored and thrilled that Dr. Feroze Sidhwa is here at UC Berkeley to share with us his insights from working in Gaza and globally among populations engulfed in war and related traumas. Dr. Sidhwa, I have learned from reading, is a truly exceptional humanitarian physician, scholar, and advocate for vulnerable and oppressed populations here in the US and abroad. He's an incredibly accomplished person with a bio that actually reads like somebody who's twice his age. And I'm just delighted in this brief intro to highlight some of his accomplishments.
You'll have to read on the internet to get the full scope of his biography and accomplishments. First of all, he has impeccable medical credentials. He trained in public health and medicine at Johns Hopkins University, Harvard University, Texas Medical School, and Boston Medical Center, Cooper University, and Cooper University Healthcare in Camden, New Jersey. He is a general trauma and critical care surgeon in California. He's triple board-certified in general surgery, trauma surgical critical care, and neurocritical care. And he is a fellow of the American College of Surgeons and of the International College of Surgeons. Just as importantly, Dr. Sidhwa is a humanitarian surgeon whose contributions go far beyond doing great clinical care in comfortable American hospitals.
He's been on the ground, witnessing, as Nora said, working to heal and save lives in some of the most troubled areas across the globe. He volunteered with the World Health Organization at the European Hospital in Khan Yunis, Gaza, from March 25th to April 8th in 2024, and again from March 3rd to April 1st in 2025 with MedGlobel, an American non-governmental organization. He's also worked in Ukraine three times with the International Medical Corps and Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, and in Zimbabwe, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Burkina Faso. Dr. Sidhwa is also a scholar and a writer. He has helped edit books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict published by the University of California Press at Berkeley and in London, and the Institute for Palestine Studies.
He's widely published in many medical journals, including the American College of Surgeons, Annals of Surgery, World Journal of Surgery, and the list goes on. In addition, Dr. Sidhwa has also been speaking on behalf of humanitarian relief work and its political implications. He recently testified about the dire medical conditions and trauma to the civilian population in Gaza at the United Nations Security Council. He's also given talks and addresses at Harvard, UC San Francisco, the University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins University, Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, NYU, and the list is extensive.
He's also spoken in the community, mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area, but also with Jewish Voice for Peace, Phoenix and Tucson, Massachusetts Peace Action, and the 2024 Democratic National Convention, and elsewhere. Dr. Sidhwa also has a very strong media presence. He's appeared on CNN, PBS, MSNBC, NPR, and BBC World News. He's been quoted widely in mainstream and alternative media, including on CBS Sunday Morning News, ABC News, Reuters, Washington Post, and again, the list goes on. These are just part of Dr. Sidhwa's activities and accomplishments. And like I said, I refer you to his webpage and information for the full extent of his contributions.
Importantly, I think all these accolades are a reflection of Dr. Sidhwa's personal passion to help the vulnerable and bring his skills and talents as a physician to directly support and uplift the voices of people who are struggling through war-torn environments across the globe and even at home, as he practices in disenfranchised communities. And I think, as someone in this field, and for those of you who are in the audience, that Dr. Sidhwa, the work that he's doing is truly inspirational, and it's a model for what we need to be thinking about and doing in our work. And now I'm very happy to welcome Dr. Sidhwa here, who we've been waiting to hear from. Please, let's extend our very warmest welcome for his joining us.
Feroze Sidhwa:
Yeah. Hi, my name's Feroze. I'm a trauma surgeon, like you said. When I was editing a book, it's called Beyond Chutzpah. It's by Norman Finkelstein for the University of California Press. I was 21 or 22 at the time. I graduated from college and then I'd gone on to work with an Arab-Jewish cooperative in Haifa. It's a city in Israel; it's the only mixed Palestinian and Jewish city in Israel. And I think the press assumed that I was some sort of Israeli professor or something because they let me keep helping edit this book, but they didn't realize I was just some random guy. But anyway, like you mentioned, I've worked in Gaza twice in the past year.
I'm going back on November 10th, actually. And I'll just talk about some of the cases that I saw there, but before that, we just kind of have to talk about what Gaza is today. And to talk about that, you have to talk about what Gaza was before October 7th and everything that happened after that. This is a medical talk, or it's a talk about medical and surgical stuff that I did. I've taken out the most graphic pictures because this isn't a group of healthcare providers necessarily, but just so you know, there are still injured people in this presentation. I'll tell you before they come up though, in case you want to look away, it's totally fine.
So I went to Gaza first with the Palestinian American Medical Association, the second time with MedGlobal. Both of these organizations feed you to the World Health Organization's EMT mechanism, the Emergency Medical Teams mechanism. And the WHO's Constitution has some important elements to it. The first statement up there is just boilerplate, but it says, "The enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being without distinction of race, religion, political belief, and economic or social condition."
We probably can all agree on that, probably almost everybody can. But the second one is more interesting. It says, "The health of all peoples is fundamental to the attainment of peace and security," meaning international peace and security, "and is dependent on the fullest cooperation of individuals and states." Well, our state doesn't much do that, so I've always taken my obligation in that regard to mean that I should do this. So like I said, to understand what Gaza has become, and actually also to understand the October 7th attacks, one has to ask, what was Gaza on October 6th of 2023? It's impossible to go through it in just a few minutes, but we'll try.
So, for people who don't know anything about the Gaza Strip and somehow ended up in this room, Gaza is a very, very small place. It's about 365 square kilometers. It's so small that it's walkable. From south to north, it's the length of a marathon, and from east to west, it's the width of a quick jog. It's about the same size as metropolitan Philadelphia, if you were to put a wall around it. It's a very, or it was, now even more, I suppose, it's a very densely populated place. Gaza City had a population density greater than that of New York City, and of course, without the height of its buildings or its legendary municipal services. Overall, the Strip was more densely populated than Boston.
It was also an extremely poor place, and this is not something that maybe is as well appreciated, especially if you didn't live through this era like I did. By October 6th of 2023, 50% of Gaza was unemployed. More than 60% of youth were unemployed, and about 80% of the population was dependent on humanitarian aid just for survival. The reason there was no extreme hunger in Gaza is only because that 80% was receiving humanitarian aid on a regular basis, its main source of calories, in fact. And the most important thing to understand about this is that this was not a new situation. This had been the case since 2014, with an event called Operation Protective Edge.
It was a massive Israeli attack on Gaza that year. Gaza is made up of 70% refugees and their descendants. In 1948, or during the 1948 war, about 250,000 Palestinians were expelled from what became Israel into the Gaza Strip. Another 500,000 were expelled into the West Bank and Jordan. Those refugees and their descendants overwhelmed the about 80,000 people that actually lived there at the time. And so, as you can imagine, that ratio approximately continued to now. Today, 70% of Gaza is refugees from that war or their descendants. Gaza is also an incredibly young place. I haven't been able to figure out if it's the youngest place in the world, but it's certainly among them.
Almost nobody is over the age of 60. Half of the population is under the age of 18, 40% is under 15, and 15% of people are under five. It's just impossible to miss this when you're there. You can't walk around without some little kid just running into your leg and then going on and continuing to play with his buddies. Gaza is also a remarkably repressed territory, politically and otherwise. After the... actually, there's Norman Finkelstein, who I just mentioned. He recently wrote a book called Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom. And in the introduction, which has a lot of useful history, he goes through the history of people describing Gaza as a concentration camp.
It's very interesting to see, the first person that he finds is a fellow named E.L.M. Burns. He was an American military veteran from World War II, and then he had some UN role in Gaza at the time. In 1955, so this is under Egyptian occupation, not Israeli, in 1955, he visits it. And in his memoir, he writes that Gaza was something like a huge concentration camp. In 1967, just after the '67 war when Israel took over the Gaza Strip, the Sinai, and the other occupied territories, Senator Gore, who was Al Gore's father, the guy who was vice president under Bill Clinton, his father was also a senator at the time. And he visited Gaza and came back, and on the Senate floor, he described Gaza as a huge concentration camp on the sand.
In the early 2000s, I think 2003 if I remember right, Baruch Kimmerling, who was the head of sociology, the George Weiss Professor of Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, wrote in his book Politicide that Gaza is the largest concentration camp that's ever existed. And then, actually, in a really interesting source, in the WikiLeaks revelations from, I guess, 2015 or somewhere around there, Giora Eiland, who is the current, if anybody's heard of the "General's Plan for Gaza," Giora Eiland is the general who came up with it. He described Gaza as a massive concentration camp. So that kind of gives you a sense of how repressed this place has been.
Since 1955 and maybe before, people who have been visiting it, that's the image that has constantly come to mind: a concentration camp. Gaza is also under what's called military occupation and has been, in one form or another, since 1948, like I said, first Egyptian and now Israeli. What that has meant for the territory is really well captured by these four resources up there. The first, at the top left, is from the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. It runs through the record of what Israeli occupation has meant for the population from 1967 to 2017, the first 50 years.
The fact that it goes on this long is kind of shocking. You can imagine the humanitarian impact has been negative. The second is on the major Israeli project in the occupied territories during that time, which was the settlement project. It's called Lords of the Land. It's by Akiva Eldar and Idith Zertal. Idith Zertal was a professor of Jewish studies at the University of Basel in Switzerland, if I remember correctly, and Akiva Eldar was the chief political columnist for Haaretz, which is Israel's most important newspaper. They describe the settlement project and the necessary displacement of the Palestinians that it entails. The title of the book Lords of the Land really is telling. It's basically that we live here, you just happen to be here, and that's your problem.
The violence that is attended to it is all secondary to this conception of the world. The third, at the bottom left, is by a woman named Sarah Roy. It's just called The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of Development, and she discusses development in detail. It's a new idea in the world of development studies that she came up with after having lived in Gaza for a while. And the fourth, at the bottom right, is a book by Benny Morris called Righteous Victims. It's a standard political-military history of the conflict by a pretty right-wing Israeli historian.
In fact, kind of a proto-fascist Israeli historian, in my opinion. But in it, he writes that the occupation, he writes, "Like all occupations, Israel's was founded on beatings and torture chambers, collaboration and fear, and daily intimidation, humiliation, and manipulation." And he goes on to point out that the constant violation of the Palestinians' rights under occupation was to be one of the chief motivators for resistance to it. In fact, despite his, like I said, almost fascist outlook on the world, he actually can't help himself but admire the protestors of the First Intifada precisely because they were protesting against something that even this guy can realize is just so evidently vile.
Finally, furthermore, Gaza is de-developed, like I mentioned a second ago. Roy's book is really necessary reading for anybody who wants to understand what Gaza was on October 6th of 2023. The latest edition of it came out in 2016, but this book is absolutely critical reading. Sarah Roy is the daughter of Holocaust survivors, and she also happens to be the chief, or the head of the, she works at the Middle East Studies Department at Harvard. And she is certainly the world's leading expert on the Gaza Strip itself and on its economy in particular. What she writes is that by 2014, by the end of the period that she mostly studied, by 2014, what she wrote about is, she said, "I have never in my life seen such human psychological and physical devastation as I see today in Gaza."
She goes on to say that the destruction of Operation Protective Edge, which we'll get to in a second, was so massive, and again, this was back in 2014, it was so massive and so devastating to Gaza's economy that it dealt a deathblow. That's the term she used. It dealt a deathblow to Gaza's economy and also to the conception of the population there that peace with Israel was even a theoretical possibility. And finally, Gaza has been under a land, air, and sea blockade really since 2005, but certainly since 2007. This is quite unique in the modern world. It's quite literally a medieval siege of the place. The first resource to look at, if you want to understand more about it, is that same book by Sarah Roy that I mentioned.
The second is a book by Norman Finkelstein, again called Gaza: An Inquest Into Its Martyrdom. It's also from University of California Press, incidentally. And in this book, they go through this really shocking record of what this blockade has meant. So, in 2007, the blockade is really firmly implemented. In 2008, Mary Robinson, she's actually still alive, she was the former president of Ireland and became one of the respected international statespeople along with Jimmy Carter and people like that. After less than a year, actually, sorry, just barely over a year, of the blockade, and this is before Israel's attack on Gaza in 2008 and 2009, she visited Gaza and said, because of the blockade there, I'm quoting her, "Their whole civilization has been destroyed. I'm not exaggerating."
She went on to say that it's unbelievable that the world doesn't care while this is happening. Again, 2007 and 2008 is hardly recent history. Well, here you can see, so again, what was Gaza on October 6th? Well, it was a very small, very dense, extremely poor population of young refugees, remarkably repressed, militarily occupied, de-developed, and subjected to the worst military blockade the world has seen since the time of Genghis Khan. The extreme closure of Gaza that starts in 2004 and then the blockade that starts afterward is kind of highlighted up there.
You can see, just to illustrate how long it's been going on for, it was also punctuated by these periodic Israeli assaults on the Gaza Strip. The three largest ones were 2008 and 2009, that one was called Operation Cast Lead, then there was one in 2012 called Operation Pillar of Defense, and then there was another one in 2014 called Operation Protective Edge, like we mentioned. But you can see that on average, every two years, Israel was conducting a massive bombing campaign against Gaza. And just to illustrate how little these things are covered, that last one, does it show up? Yeah, that last one, Operation Shield and Arrow, that is not the Israeli attack on Gaza after October 7th.
That was an Israeli attack on Gaza in May of 2023. That literally was never even reported in the United States outside of specialist journals. It just doesn't matter when you blow up Palestinians; it's just not an issue. Well, so what has Gaza become since October 7th? Well, if Gaza was unique before, then it has really become a separate planet now. Gaza is the deadliest place in the world for civilians and aid workers, according to the International Rescue Committee and plenty of others. Gaza, this is UNICEF talking, Gaza is once again, and I stress once again, the most dangerous place in the world to be a child.
The level of child killing in Gaza is maybe better understood now than when I first started giving this talk two years ago, but it still is not quite all that well understood. In the year 2022, when Russia invaded mainland Ukraine, the war in Ukraine was the deadliest war for children in the world, or the deadliest conflict for children in the world. In that year, if I remember the numbers exactly, 735 children were killed. If you compare that to the first year of the Israeli attack on Gaza, and if you adjust for the size of the population, because Ukraine has 40 million people in it and Gaza has about two, the rate of killing of children in Gaza is almost 600 times higher than it is in Ukraine.
And again, I stress, Ukraine was the worst place in the world for children prior to this. It's just an absolutely shocking differential. Gaza is the deadliest place for journalists, probably in the history of the world. Actually, the Brown Watson Institute recently put out a report that people probably have seen. More journalists have been killed in the Gaza Strip in two years, actually, it was about six months ago they put it out, so in 18 months, than in World War I, World War II, the entire Indochina War, including Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, all the Balkans wars of the '90s, and the entire War on Terror, other than the Iraq War.
And I think now it would actually encompass, you could even include the Iraq War in it. Again, these numbers are just utterly outrageous. Gaza is a postage stamp on the world. It's a tiny little place. Gaza has been physically destroyed far worse than Aleppo, Mariupol, or even Dresden and Rotterdam during World War II. And you can actually add Hiroshima and Nagasaki to that. Interestingly enough, even Jared Kushner agrees that it looks like a nuclear weapon hit Gaza. About 70 or 80 percent of structures in Gaza have been physically destroyed.
I will tell you that just having walked around Khan Yunis, and Khan Yunis is the least affected city by this assault, when I was there in March of this year, even there, one out of every four buildings is destroyed, and literally every building is so severely damaged that it would certainly be condemned in the United States. Gaza is, by far and away, the thirstiest place in the history of the world. And that's a pretty shocking statement, but nevertheless, it's true. Back when, let's see, Oxfam put this report out in, I think it was March of last year, March or April of last year, but it's a very worthwhile report reading. It's called Water War Crimes. They estimated that at the time there were 500,000 people in the Mawasi area.
That's the beach just west of Khan Yunis in the middle of Gaza. There were 500,000 people there, and there were 120 toilets. Eventually, there were one and a half million people in that area. 120 toilets, no showers, no infrastructure of any kind. Oxfam estimated that when there were half a million people in there, the Mawasi could provide about two liters of water per person per day. Two liters, that's not for drinking, that's for all things that humans use water for: drinking, cooking, cleaning, toileting, everything.
This is, again, complete insanity. Gaza is also the hungriest place in the history of the modern world. People probably know that by now, and actually this, I apologize because this is an old screenshot from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, but Gaza was finally declared to be in famine a few months ago by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification. That's the major group and the major technical organization that monitors food and security problems in the world. Well, interestingly enough, of course, the people who call themselves pro-Israel, they lost their minds over this, saying, of course, it's all fake and it's all made up.
But kind of interestingly, they didn't notice that there was one part of it that was made up, which was the mortality data. The IPC, in order to declare famine, you have to have a certain level of inaccessibility of food, which makes perfect sense. And then you have to have a certain level of crude mortality. There was actually no evidence that Gaza reached that level of crude mortality because nobody can even measure it. Nobody has any idea how many people are dying in Gaza all the time. But they said, "With this degree of food deprivation, it's simply impossible that people are not going to be dying at these massive rates," so they declared a famine.
But if you go back and look, Gaza's had this level of food deprivation since about December of 2023. I'm on calls with these people all the time, and I've been quite critical of them in their hesitancy to call a famine prior to this. But nevertheless, Gaza has actually reached the point of famine. It is important to remember Gaza is still in famine right now. Gaza is probably the most wounded place in the history of the world. It's kind of hard to find comparative statistics about that, but if anybody can even name a close second as a candidate, I'd love to know what it is.
And finally, Gaza has undergone the most sustained and direct attack on a healthcare system that has ever been carried out. I mean, I don't know about the time of Genghis Khan or something, but in the history of modern warfare, there is nothing, and I do mean nothing, that comes even remotely close to this. Again, the comparison is Ukraine. The rate of killing of healthcare workers in Ukraine used to make Ukraine the deadliest place for healthcare workers in the world. Today, or I should say in the past two years, the rate of killing of healthcare workers, again adjusted for the population compared to Ukraine, was hundreds of times higher in Gaza than compared to Ukraine.
And again, Ukraine was the worst place in the world at the time. The same is true of arrests of healthcare workers. The same is true of direct attacks on hospitals. The same is true of killings of patients in hospitals. It's like literally every metric that the Humanitarian Data Exchange, which is a UN database that it follows, every single metric is quite literally two orders of magnitude worse in the Gaza Strip. So, let's just talk about two cases briefly.
The first was a little girl. Her name was Jouri. She was nine years old. She had been injured in an explosion about two weeks before I met her. At the time, she had an external fixator placed, that's the pins that go into your bones and then the bar that's outside them to keep them stable. And her wounds had been closed primarily, meaning somebody just took the skin and tacked it back into place. It says graphic surgical photos, but they're, I took them out because you're not surgeons. So this little girl rolled into the preoperative area when Marc Perlmutter and I were standing around there. It was Ramadan during the time, and since he and I aren't Muslim, we didn't really care, so we would just walk around the hospital looking for something to do.
And this little girl just rolled into the preoperative area, and the nurse looked at me and said, "Can you do her operation?" Of course, I said, "No, I have no idea who she is, and I don't know what operation she needs, and she's a child, and I can't ask her." But when I took a look at her, it was pretty clear she was about to die, actually. She was dying of septic shock. Now, I didn't know why. Her heart rate was about 160 or 170. Her pulse was so weak that I could only feel it in her neck, I couldn't even feel it in her wrist anymore. And if I tried to examine her, she just screamed for her father.
The only thing she would say was, "wein baba, wein baba," where's my dad? And she was just terrified. I actually thought she was about five years old because she was acting more like a five-year-old than a nine-year-old. So we finally held the poor thing down, got an IV in her, gave her a bunch of IV fluids. Her blood pressure came up to the point that you could at least feel her pulse in her wrist. And then we took her to the operating room and anesthetized her. Now, this is what she looked like, sweet little kid. You can see, I don't know if it projects well, but you can see the temporal wasting that she has.
So this girl, and you can also see kind of the puffiness of her eyelids and the puffiness of her face in general. This girl is dying of septic shock. But again, I didn't know why. I'd never met her before, and also nobody knew who she was. Nobody knew what her name was. Nobody knew if she had any family in the hospital. So, we decided to take a risk. I mean, I'd be fired for doing this in the United States, obviously, but here we had more means. So this is what she looked like in the operating room. I won't show you any more graphic photos than this.
When we took these casts and bandages off, you can just barely see the... there you go, you can see the external fixator over here. It's on the lateral side of her left leg. But when we took all these bandages off, and I'm sorry, I hope it doesn't freak anybody out, but when we took all these bandages off, maggots fell out of all of her wounds, all over the place. We had to wash them off the table into a bucket. This is completely ridiculous. Those maggots, though, are actually the only reason she was alive. Once we anesthetized her, we turned her on her side and she had these huge wounds to both sides of her buttocks and to her left leg.
Her left leg was missing the entire quadriceps and hamstring muscles right above the knee. I have no idea how her leg stayed attached to her, to be perfectly honest. Her femur, about two inches of it, was gone. And the wounds on her buttocks were so deep that a large plot of her gluteus maximus muscle was actually gone. This is what maggots were falling out of. You can just see her right leg and right arm were also broken, but those were the least of her issues. So when we took care of it, Marc and I were really upset about this because we knew, we could tell, that somebody had obviously operated on this kid beforehand because she wasn't born with an external fixator on.
And we were really mad because this was a total BS operation. I mean, we were furious. "Who put this crap up? Who did this crappy operation? This kid almost died because of this." Well, so we started asking after the operation. We started asking around and we finally found the person who did it. And we said, "Look, man, why'd you do such a bad job? It wasn't like a complicated thing that you had to do." It turned out he was a med student. And so we said, "Oh, well, who supervised you doing the operation?" Nobody, because the attending who was supposed to be on call that day was dead. So that's the downstream consequence of murdering physicians.
Well, so eventually, what I'm trying to illustrate here is the fact that her left leg is now much shorter than her right. Eventually, Marc and I put together a team of what, six or seven surgeons, two anesthesiologists. And over the course of about 10 more days, we were able to slowly close up Jouri's wounds. We actually got to the point that she could eat. Food was still coming into Gaza at this time, not to northern Gaza, but to Khan Yunis where we were. And eventually her sepsis cleared, her personality resurfaced, which was actually really nice because she was a very sharp-witted kid.
She probably didn't remember the last two weeks. And so she just kind of woke up in this world where her dad would all of a sudden just do anything that she told him to, because he was so terrified that... Eventually we met her father who was in the hospital with her. He was so terrified that she was just dying slowly in this corner. And eventually she got better, so he was super excited. And it was actually really sweet because she eventually started saying, "I don't want to do any..." This is all in Arabic, obviously, but "I'm not going to do any more of this anesthesia nonsense unless you get me phone calls with my siblings and honey melon to eat afterwards."
The kid doesn't understand she's in a land in famine, right? So he would go out and try to find literally, and he would sometimes come back with even like half a square of chocolate to give her. I had no idea how we would find these things, but he would. The reason her siblings were not with her is because they had actually been... Eventually we asked her dad what had happened. They had evacuated because the Israelis dropped leaflets on their neighborhood in Khan Yunis, saying, "Go away." And so they did. They went down to Rafah where I believe her dad's parents lived, and stayed in their home. The mom and dad dropped the kids off and then went out to find things that old people and children need to survive: water, food, medicine, whatever it might be.
They came back and the house had been blown up and neighbors said, "Most of your kids went to Emirati Women and Children's Hospital and one of them went to European Hospital where I was." So dad went there and mom went to the other hospital to take care of the other kids. Again, this is the kind of thing that we've been subjecting Gaza to for quite a while. But anyway, eventually Jouri was actually evacuated to Egypt, and I gave a talk at the Palestine Children's Relief Fund in San Diego. It was just a fundraising talk, but they actually found her and they found her aunt who was with her took a video of her just saying she's doing better and her leg is healing. That was actually very, very gratifying.
This next case is a case of a 29-year-old man who was shot and then subjected to medical neglect and torture. Her, or his, initial injury, rather, was probably in late November of 2023. When I met him, he had osteomyelitis, which is infection of the bone, with sepsis and non-union of his right tibia, which means that his bone just wasn't healing properly. A ruptured right globe, meaning eyeball, and acute protein-calorie malnutrition, starvation. So this is Tamer. For the people who maybe don't know some of the history that we went over about Gaza, probably just at the beginning of the talk, it's hard to appreciate how lucky a young man in Gaza, in the last 10 years, has to be to be in this picture.
This is a conservative Arab society, and young men without jobs don't get married. You don't get married, you don't have a family, and you don't have a future. Well, Tamer did quite well for himself, and these pictures are from his Facebook page that you'll see, and he was fine with me showing them. Tamer must have done quite well in high school because he eventually got into the Palestine College of Nursing. He got married at that point, had two kids, like you can see here, they're kind of cute. But in the Palestine College of Nursing, he also did quite well for himself because he eventually landed a job working as a surgical nurse at the Indonesian Hospital's Orthopedic Unit, quite a prized position actually in the Gaza Strip.
Well, in late November of 2023, he was closing a wound at the end of a case and Israeli soldiers raided the hospital. They came into the operating room and demanded that he leave. And he said, "I can't. I have to finish the operation. This guy can't just stay under anesthesia forever." So, they shot him in his leg and left him on the floor. Well, his own team picked him up, put him an external fixator or put an external fixator on him and put him in the hospital. Well, if you look at this picture, obviously this man has been victimized. There's no question about that, but this is the kind of momentary loss of human dignity and safety and infliction of pain and suffering, things like that, that somebody can get over.
It happened in a moment and now it's done with. You can see he's upset, but he smiles for the camera. He looks like he's relatively healthy, relatively well-fed. He still looks like he's in his 20s. What happened to Tamer next is very different, though. After this picture was taken, the Israelis raided the hospital again and they took him. They took him probably to Sde Teiman, but who knows. He was strapped to a table for 45 days, blindfolded the entire time, neglected so severely that the external fixator on his leg became infected. He was beaten so badly that his right eye had to be removed when he was let go from the hospital.
This is what he looked like when he got out. You can see he's lost a tremendous amount of weight in just 45 days, that's a pretty shocking thing. He told us he was fed a juice box every day or every other day, but that isn't really the issue. You could feed somebody as much as you want in those circumstances and they're still going to lose a ton of weight. You can see his right eye has been removed. You can see his head has been bandaged up. And you can see that somebody, probably an orthopedic surgeon, figured that the source of his ongoing sepsis was the external fixator, so they've removed it. This is what he looked like a few weeks later when Marc and I met him.
Marc, he's the guy in the cap on the left. Marc is an orthopedic surgeon and this guy was an orthopedic nurse, so Marc met him and kind of bonded with him. And what had turned out is that it wasn't just the ex-fix that was infected, but the parts of the bone that are drilled into when you actually place the external fixator had become necrotic. So we needed to anesthetize him and just kind of pick away at these parts of bone, which is not technically difficult, but you do need anesthesia for it because he'll be screaming in pain otherwise. Well, for several days, we tried to get this done and the OR just kept saying there's no space, there's no space. And they were right.
When I got to European Hospital, the first thing we did was organize a nursing-led wound care team. And so I went around the hospital. It's a 240 or 250-bed hospital, I can't remember now, with 1,500 people admitted to it. So it's already at seven times its bed capacity, which is just totally outrageous. When hospitals in the US go to 105% of their bed capacity, everybody loses their minds. But so the hospital's extremely crowded. And in the first three days, I found about 250 people, half of whom are small children, that needed daily operative wound care, meaning I needed to take them to the operating room, anesthetize them, do something with a knife or suture or whatever it might be, and then take them back to their room, probably do that again the next day.
There's four operating rooms at European Hospital. How could you possibly do this for 250 people, even in my full two-week mission there? And that's leaving aside that every day there's several mass-casualty events where 30 to 50 people come into the ER severely wounded, again half of whom are small children. It was just impossible to actually do this. So, and I'm not terribly proud of this, but I think it was the right thing to do. I actually started stealing ketamine from the anesthetic carts and just anesthetizing people on the floor, the floor meaning the ward of the hospital. Now, you're doing this with cats walking around and children running in and bumping into you and stuff like that.
And I do my own conscious sedation work in the United States. So, it's not like I was doing something I don't know how to do. That wouldn't be appropriate. But it's still obviously well below the standard of care to administer anesthesia in a ward. I mean, you should do that in a controlled environment. Everybody was fine, thankfully, but it's not a good thing. But anyway, that's just kind of the level of care that we were being driven to, because otherwise people were just dying of sepsis in their rooms because their wounds were unattended to. Unlike Jouri, they didn't have the luxury of having maggots in their wounds. So this is Tamer the day we left, actually.
You can see he looks better. And in fact, he did improve. We were also, because we came in through Egypt at that time, which now you can't, but at that time you could, and we had brought a bunch of antibiotics with us that the hospital didn't have access to, and so he benefited from those as well. So, you can see Tamer here now. He's certainly physically better. You can see he's gained a little bit of weight. You can see, however, he's still extremely malnourished. You can see obviously his right eye is never going to grow back. But just to point out something about this man, the guy in that picture is 29 years old.
It's kind of a shock. I have to remind myself of that. It's quite shocking. He looks like he's 90. And in fact, actually after this moment, this was the first time we worked on Tamer, I asked Marc, "Hey, where's the 29-year-old guy you wanted us to operate on?" because I didn't think it was him, and it's just completely outrageous. But now, like most torture and torment victims, physically he's getting better. He's actually in Egypt as well now.
Physically, he's getting better, but his mind and his psyche, his spirit, his soul, whatever you want to call it, is completely and utterly destroyed. He has no idea if his wife and children are alive or dead. He is so paranoid now that he won't actually let any of the Egyptian nurses touch him because he thinks they're all Israeli agents trying to kill him. They're not, it's totally silly, but that's the level of destruction that was done to this productive young man's psyche, his mind. And what was the point? He was let go. He obviously wasn't a threat to anybody. It's just totally outrageous. It's hard to understand how this helps anybody.
Well, these cases, I could go on with plenty of others, but there's limited time, obviously, but these cases illustrate a few things. The healthcare system in Gaza has been massively overwhelmed, not only by the enormous needs but by the direct attacks on healthcare workers and facilities. I actually, I don't like to make the talk about me, but the second time I went to Gaza, I was at Nasser Medical Complex, which is on the western side of Khan Yunis. And on March 23rd, I remember the date because it's my sister's birthday, I went down to one of my patients' rooms, Ibrahim, he was a 16-year-old boy. I had done a colostomy on him a few days before for injuries to his rectum and colon, and he was actually fine, and he was ready to go home.
We lived on the fourth floor. His room was on the second floor in the men's surgical ward. And on my way down the stairs to his room, I was about 60 seconds away from his room, his room exploded. The Israelis fired a drone-fired missile into it, killed him, killed the other guy in the room, who was probably the target, they claimed he was the prime minister of Gaza, but I don't think he knew that. And, yeah, it was just absolutely shocking. Hospitals are not meant to withstand military attacks. In fact, that's why the oldest aspect of the Geneva, or the oldest part of the Geneva Conventions dates back to 1864. And just to be clear, we're talking about Napoleon.
The 1864 is so long ago that the American Civil War was still going on at the time. And back then, Europeans, who were by far the most violent lunatics in the world at the time, just delighted in killing each other, back then, they agreed that doctors and hospitals should not be attacked. What are we doing in 2025? Well, malnutrition, another thing that this illustrates is that malnutrition, destruction of the WASH infrastructure, WASH is, sorry, water, sanitation, and hygiene, displacement, and overcrowding, are basically making surgical success impossible. It's kind of silly to even talk about it, to be perfectly honest. It was possible to provide advanced care in that setting.
But like I said, I needed a team of eight surgeons, literally eight, I'm not exaggerating about that, eight surgeons, anesthesiologists, et cetera, to get one kid well, and it took 10 days. And now, she's been evacuated to Egypt. Well, she's very, very lucky in that regard. The other tens of thousands of children in Gaza have not been so lucky. Well, what does all this mean? I know we're short on time, I'll finish here, but there's a choice that has to be made, and not just about Gaza, about plenty of other places too, but Gaza really illustrates it starkly. And I think it's illustrated, I think that the choice itself, you can see in these two pictures that I took, they're both signs that were in European Hospital when I was there.
The first one on the left, it says it was behind the nurses' station in the little outlying area of the hospital where I slept. It says, "Enter this place with love and leave us with a beautiful smile." I don't speak Arabic, but the Google Translate tells me that Arabic says the same thing. And the other one, though, this is graffiti that was outside of Jouri's room. Jouri was the little girl. It says, "In Gaza, we don't care any more about anything." You can understand the cynicism. We, meaning people like us in this room, not only me, like a healthcare provider, but we meaning Americans, are going to have to decide which of these two futures Gaza will see.
The choice is actually more up to us than it is up to them. If we take our boot off their neck, they will build the society on the left. But if we don't, the despair and the cynicism will continue, and God only knows where that leads. This is a picture of Mahmoud Abu Nujaila. He was a general surgeon. He was three years younger than me when he was killed, actually. Actually, now, he was five years younger than me when he was killed. He was murdered by the Israelis in an airstrike on Al-Wada Hospital using an American plane to drop an American munition, burning American jet fuel, probably with an American guidance system on it, but an Israeli pilot, I suppose.
On November 21st of 2023, he had been ensconced in the hospital while it was under siege and under attack. After the IDF had finished destroying the place, the journalists who went in, found this operating room whiteboard with his signature, it says, "Whoever stays until the end will tell the story. We did what we could. Remember us." Well, there's an ethicist at the University of Sussex in Britain named Arianne Shahvisi, and she said, "Who caused the scarcity?", meaning the scarcity that led him to make such a plaintive statement. "Somebody tell people what happened here." "The question of who caused this scarcity is firmly within the remit of this discipline," meaning the discipline of medical ethics, but maybe ethics generally.
"We did what we could are the words of doctors operating under conditions of extreme and devastating scarcity." And she goes on to talk about how there are other cases of incursion, occupation, and even genocide where healthcare infrastructure is targeted, Ukraine, Tigray in Ethiopia, Sudan, South Sudan, Yemen, there are plenty of other examples. And she says, "Their neglect in the medical ethics literature is generally the result of ignorance, requiring a different call to arms. When I ask my colleagues about their silence on Gaza, more often than ignorance, they confess that they fear wading into something that is complicated and political."
She goes on to say, "That's understandable. We all face some level of retaliation, and there's all sorts of ways of intimidating people. But are we ethicists or not? A complicated, uncomfortable, political, ethical problem is no less of an ethical problem. Will we be able to say we did what we could? The medics of Gaza are doing their jobs at risk of death, and we need to step up and do ours", meaning as advocates. Gandhi put it more simply. He just said that "the massacre of innocent people is a serious matter. It's not a thing to be easily forgotten, and it's our duty to cherish their memory."
Well, one way that you cherish the memory of the victims of massacres and other crimes is by, number one, acknowledging their existence and the fact that a crime was committed against them. So this is a picture of Hersh Goldberg-Polin. Anybody who pays attention to the news knows who he is. In August of last year, Israeli special forces were apparently getting close to the tunnel where he was being held, and in order to prevent his rescue by the Israeli military, he was executed by his captors. That's obviously a shocking crime. Now, Hersh Goldberg-Polin was an ex-IDF soldier, and that doesn't change anything about how criminal that act was. It doesn't change his humanity.
It doesn't change anything else. That's a shocking crime: to murder a bound and helpless person. In fact, he only had one arm because he had saved a lot of other people's lives on October 7th by throwing a grenade or by grabbing a grenade that had been thrown into the shelter that he had jumped into. He picked it up and tried to throw it out, but it exploded in his hand and his hand was amputated afterwards. Hundreds and hundreds of news stories have been written about Hersh. He has a Wikipedia page. Actually, his parents spoke at the DNC on the main stage the same day I did.
I wasn't on the main stage. They pushed us as far away from the main stage as possible. But nevertheless, because Hersh was a dual US-Israeli citizen, the Biden administration had made him a big point of propaganda. Biden apparently called his parents on a weekly basis to tell them about updates about finding him, things like that. And all of this is completely and totally appropriate. He's the victim of a crime. Kidnapping is a crime. Murder is a crime. We should treat him that way.
This, on the other hand, is Abdul Rahman al-Najjar. He was a 21-year-old, third-year medical student when I met him. These scrubs were the only thing I ever saw him wear. He had been displaced from Gaza City and was living in Khan Yunis. His parents lived in a tent in the Mawasi in the most unimaginable circumstances, no dignity, no running water, no toilet, like we were mentioning before. Nevertheless, he showed up to work every day, not being paid, he's a medical student, and his dream was to become a plastic and reconstructive surgeon. Now, if you think about this guy for a second: he's 21 years old in 2024. He's born into what has been described as a concentration camp since at least 1955.
When he's about four years old, that concentration camp is put under a hermetic seal, a medieval siege, if you want to call it that. Every two years of his life, there's a massive Israeli bombing campaign in his homeland. His family members are killed. His friends are killed. His schools are destroyed. He sees entire apartment blocks erased from the face of the earth. He witnesses over and over and over again the indifference of the world to the fate of him and his people. He watches the Great March of Return. I don't know if any of you know what this is, but the Great March, he watches the absolutely shocking failure of Palestinian civil nonviolent resistance in the Great March of Return.
He watches how the world just doesn't care as Palestinians are shot dead and shot dead and shot dead and shot dead, not for a week, not for a month, but for two years straight. That happens from the time he was about 14 to 16. When he's 18, he decides to go to medical school. That's shocking. I don't think I would have. I don't. I just, I have to be honest, I don't think I would have been in that mindset. I think I would have said, "No, I want revenge on somebody. I don't want to put people back together. I want to blow them apart." I can very easily see myself, and I hope most of you can understand why. That would be a very, very common way of thinking about the world there.
Nevertheless, he decided to go to medical school. When he was 20 years old, his medical school was physically destroyed. And when he was 21 years old, he was murdered. He was killed in a bombing of his home, the home that he was staying in with his uncle and his cousin. Now, no news story has ever been written about him, in the English language, at least. I have a Google alert and it hasn't gone off yet. No Wikipedia page exists for him. Biden has never called his parents. I don't know if they're even alive, to be honest. And even Western reporters who have written stories about Palestinian medical students have not been interested in even mentioning his name. I've reached out to several of them. It tells you something about who we are.
This is the last slide. There was a Swedish novelist named Henning Mankell, I think it was 1990, in 1990, he was observing atrocities being committed in northern Mozambique by the South African apartheid government. He was walking toward a village that had been burned by the US-backed anti-communist forces When he saw something that he, as he wrote, "I shall never forget it as long as I live," he saw a young man walking toward him in rags. He said that this young man had painted shoes onto his feet. He said he had nothing, no clothes, no shoes, not even a pair of sandals made from a car tire. And because he had nothing, he had to create some of his own, so he painted shoes onto his feet.
In doing so, he boosted his awareness that despite his destitution and misery, yet he was a human being deserving of dignity. Something we can all understand, I think. Probably like many of you, I've witnessed lots of scenes of deprivation and violence against people like that in the world. This moment at European Hospital reminded me of it. The man in the frame is Ammar Rafana (phonetic), he's a Palestinian American. He was born in Ohio, I believe. He was one of the trauma surgeons that came on the trip to European Hospital with me, or I shouldn't say with me; we went together. The man just out of the frame was one of the scrub techs, the people who help us in the operating room with stuff.
The scrub tech was showing Amarr something on his phone. You can see the phone's got some Scotch tape and marker on it. After they were done, I asked, "Why do you have Scotch tape and marker on your phone?" He said that when he was taken from Shifa Hospital during the raid on Shifa, Shifa was the major medical complex in Gaza, for all practical purposes, it doesn't exist anymore. When he was taken from there, he was part of a small group of healthcare workers that was relatively quickly released by the Israeli forces. The Israeli commander that had imprisoned them made very clear to his soldiers: he said, "These people didn't do anything wrong. Their arrest was completely mistaken. Just let them go."
He emphasized that they were not to destroy their cell phones, which is the standard practice. In fact, every time I go to Gaza, I get a flood of people just asking me to bring them a cell phone because actually every time somebody has contact with the Israelis, the first thing they do is destroy their phone. But the soldiers wanted to torment them. So they said, "Oh, we can't destroy their phones. Give us the cases to your phones." So they broke the cases, dropped the phones on the ground, and walked away. But I think, it's, in a way, similar to what Mankell witnessed, just refusing to submit to his own dehumanization, this man in a sense painted shoes on his feet.
I think we should really consider our own role in what has been done to Gaza, not just in the past two years, certainly since, you could argue, since 1967 or even before that, but certainly since the early 2000s. I think we should be genuinely ashamed of it. And I think we should decide to do something about it. Thanks.
Nora Jacobsen Ben Hammed:
I know you're going back, so maybe you can talk about when you're going back, what you anticipate, what has driven your decision to go back.
Feroze Sidhwa:
What influenced my decision to go back? I mean-
Nora Jacobsen Ben Hammed:
Sure.
Feroze Sidhwa:
Yeah. I can't tell you we should do something about this and then not go back. But yeah, I mean, I have a unique, not a unique, skill set. There's lots of trauma surgeons in the world, but I have a unique set of circumstances, I guess, related to this. I am a county and federal employee, meaning I'm almost impossible to fire. I happen to have been reading... I'm not some sort of, like, it would be wrong to call me a historian of the conflict, but I have read a lot. I've read almost all of the main texts about the conflict. I know something about the history, in other words, especially from the standpoint of the US's involvement in it.
And also, and I hate saying this because it implies that it's the way things ought to be, it's not the way things ought to be, but because I'm not Muslim, I'm not Arab, I'm not Palestinian, I don't get that automatic assumption of insincerity or untrustworthiness that comes along with that, that kind of racist assumption that I'm sure plenty of you have dealt with. So because of that, I have kind of an unusual ability to go to Gaza and then come back, and to people who are interested in hearing what I have to say, to report on it.
Somebody mentioned that I've been on CNN and the BBC and stuff like that, which honestly mostly is probably a waste of time, but at least it gets it in front of somebody who might be willing to listen, might be interested. I was able to write a New York Times article about what healthcare workers in Gaza had seen. So, that's the main reason that I go back. But yeah, I'm going back on November 10th. It seems silly to call the January 19th to March 18th ceasefire a "ceasefire." It seems really stupid to call this one a ceasefire since it's just constant bombing, but we'll see how it is when I'm there. Yeah.
Nora Jacobsen Ben Hammed:
There are numerous aid efforts, both collective efforts and individuals pleading for help on social media. What sources of aid are getting through, and which seem most impactful?
Feroze Sidhwa:
It's extremely difficult to know on a day-to-day basis what aid is getting into Gaza. There are all sorts of tricks and nonsense that are employed in the news. And the Israelis and the US are quite media-adept, so you have to be really careful in understanding what kind of aid is going into and not going into Gaza. But it's honestly not really that worth looking into that much in depth on a day-to-day basis, it just doesn't help you figure anything out. In general, very little aid is still getting into the Gaza Strip. It's certainly better than it was before. People that I know there say the prices in the market have come down a little bit.
I have an anesthesiologist friend named Nazar (phonetic). His home was finally destroyed in eastern Khan Yunis in, it's October, so probably in September of this year, and he had to move to the Mawasi, to the beach area again. And he just sent me a picture of his, he has five boys, all about 12 and under, I think, and he just sent me a picture of how they finally found a chicken, and they're literally just standing around it, edging closer, edging closer. It's not even cooked yet, but he literally said it's the only protein they've eaten in the last nine months. The last time I was there was from March 6th or 8th, I can't remember now, March 6th to April 1st.
And the border was closed to all aid on March 2nd, so just for four days. The first day I was there, there was an animal protein that was served with dinner. And I don't care about this, I'm happy to not eat meat for a few weeks, but this is a meat-eating culture, and it was Ramadan, where normally you eat a very rich meal in the evening. I ate meat that day, and I don't think I ate meat until the day before I was going to leave. So in the meantime, it was literally just rice and a few scattered chickpeas in there, and that was it. That was literally it. And I had brought food, I had protein bars and stuff, so I was fine.
But it just illustrates, like, we had money. If we wanted to, we could go out and buy, there's nothing to buy. It was completely nuts. Actually, Marc Perlmutter, who, he went back with me the second time as well, was in Deir al-Balah, which is just north of Khan Yunis and also a relatively unaffected part of the Strip, relatively. There's no unaffected, but relatively unaffected part of the Strip. He went to buy a can of tuna, and I think he said that... and he didn't do it, because he'll get ripped off if he tries to do this, so he sent one of his med students. The med student came back and said they wanted like 300 shekels for it. This is like $100.
So, it's completely ludicrous. But this is the situation. Now, for people who don't, maybe again, if you don't follow the news, or not the news, but I guess maybe if you don't follow the Israeli press closely because they're more honest about these things, from March, like I said, from March 2nd until, what, May 18th or 19th, something like that, literally nothing went into Gaza. No food, zero. After that, it became a big international scandal. Finally, even the Trump administration had had enough of it, and they said, "You have to let some food in." So they started to let some food in, but they also empowered these gangs.
The most famous one is the Abu Shabab gang in Rafah, but there are plenty of others. They empowered them to steal all of this aid as it would come in. And in an absolutely, I don't want to say words that'll make people angry, but in a turn of propaganda that really would make Goebbels blush, they blamed Hamas for stealing this food. But they empowered these gangs to steal the food. And it was to the point, it's actually pretty shocking details, it was to the point that even when the international aid organizations themselves would say, "Can you please just let us turn and make a right on this street so that our convoy won't be robbed?" the Israeli military just said, "No, you have to follow the prescribed route."
They said, "Yeah, but there's no, we walked that route yesterday, there's no one there, and there's no unexploded ordnance. It'll be fine. We want to take that route." "No, you have to take the route where we can clearly see from our observation posts that there are gangs waiting to take the aid." It was this blatant. It was not hidden at all. And in fact, I don't know if people remember what the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation was, but the GHF actually started delivering aid directly to the compounds of these gangs. There's actually a, I forget if it was DropSite News or if it was 972 Magazine.
Some news site just interviewed somebody from one of these gangs who actually gave them a video of these gang compounds that exist in Rafah and parts of Gaza City. And while they're walking around, not only can they see new motorcycles, new cars, crates of ammunition that have been brought in, all from the Israelis, but they can see brand-new GHF pallets full of food still wrapped up in plastic wrap, meaning they were obviously delivered there with a forklift. They didn't go get them from the GHF site and bring them back. Anyway, sorry, the point is Gaza is still in an extreme deprivation state when it comes to food and water.
Leave aside overcrowding and all sorts of other stuff. And the term "upshot" seems inappropriate to use, but the upshot of all of that is that the only place that you can actually get food right now is mostly from these gangs. And so when you're giving to people on social media, and I don't mean to say that you shouldn't do it, because people have to, it's hard to know what's the greater evil in that situation, but these people are having to pay these gangs on the black market, which further empowers these gangs. But that's just the situation that we're in right now. All of this could be instantly solved by just letting the border be open.
But again, that's a choice that we have to make. If we put enough pressure on our senators, our representatives, actually, a friend of mine, Thaer Ahmad, he was just in DC doing a lot of advocacy work, and what he said was that when he went around to Republican offices, they were actually all of a sudden willing to listen to somebody because now it's Donald Trump's peace plan that they want to support. Yeah, that's complete nonsense. Obviously, there's no peace and there's no plan. Well, Trump probably never even saw it, but nevertheless, it's like the president's agenda and it's our party and okay, fine.
So there is kind of that opening with Republican congresspeople. Democrats have unfortunately been mostly just as useless until recently. The Block the Bombs bill did get a relatively good showing amongst Senate Democrats, but even then it's still pretty bad. So, more effective than sending people money, or I shouldn't say more effective, but if you're going to send people money electronically, which does work actually, because Gazans are pretty innovative people, they've come up with all sorts of ways of transferring money to each other.
And I'll be honest, when I lived in the West Bank after my first year of med school, there was a store owner that I would hang out with, and he literally never took money from anybody. As they came in and left and came in and left, they would just take something, he would just write it down and sometimes just remember it. It's not uncommon for people to work on a credit system in a place where everybody actually knows each other. So yeah, so sending people money to buy food might be helping to empower these gangs, but at the same time, it does help feed their children. But more importantly, would just be getting on our own Congress people to tell the Israelis, "Look, just let the trucks go in."
One thing I hope people understand this, if you're talking about the more remote parts of Sudan, where the rapid support forces are committing genocide also at our behest, but that's a different matter, that is a very logistically challenging place to deliver aid. It's mountainous, there's no roads, et cetera, et cetera. Gaza is completely the opposite. It's surrounded by two countries that are heavily integrated into the international system, one of which is a technological powerhouse. There's all sorts of roads going directly to Gaza. There's hardly any difficulty of getting in. And the World Food Program, for the past year, has had enough food outside of Gaza to feed everyone there for a year.
And that's just one group. The Rebuilding Alliance has more, MedGlobal has more, UNRWA has more, everybody. There's tons of food. It's just that it's literally two miles away from children who are starving to death. It's a pretty shocking thing, actually. It's kind of hard to compare it in my mind. Again, if somebody can come up with a better analogy, I'd love to hear it, but it's quite similar to the Warsaw ghetto. Yeah. Children are starving to death inside and people are having opulent meals outside. It's pretty shocking.
Nora Jacobsen Ben Hammed:
I'm a surgical nurse. What was the Most challenging moment you had in the operating room as a surgeon? Lack of sterility, lack of anesthesia, any innovations you came up with, and how did your trip change your perception of the situation?
Feroze Sidhwa:
So the most... It's not funny. I just laugh because I remember it. But the most challenging moment was actually, I mentioned Ibrahim, the 16-year-old boy that was killed in his room. When he was killed, I was actually ... The reason I was going down the stairs, or the reason I was actually in the ICU on the fourth floor, which was the same place that our living quarters was. And there was a patient, also a 16-year-old boy, actually, who had been transferred in from another hospital. He had had his spleen removed, but the operation hadn't been done properly and he was still bleeding internally, so he needed to go back to the operating room.
Okay, fine. That's the kind of thing I'm trained to do. So I said, "Let's take this kid to the operating room." And literally, as I walked out of the ICU, I was going to go tell the OR team that to get ready for this kid, it was one of those, it's those swingy doors that go in and out. And as I pushed it open, the bomb blast pushed the door back into me. So, that was when I knew the hospital had been bombed. And so then they kind of restricted us to the ICU. They said, "You can't go anywhere, because..." basically, the hospital administration put the hospital on lockdown just because they don't know, are the Israelis going to raid?
Are they going to bomb it again? Who knows? And so this kid, I'm sitting here at this kid's bedside and he's just bleeding and bleeding and there's nothing I can do about it because I really have to get into the operating room. And so finally after an hour, the lockdown of the hospital was lifted. So I left the ICU and I went down to the ER because I assumed the ER had been bombed. But on my way down, I realized it was actually the surgical ward that had been bombed. So I said, "Oh, crap." So I walked in there, but it was, you can imagine it was a total disaster, couldn't help at all in there, especially not speaking Arabic.
So I went down to the ER and I said, "Does anybody need an operation from what just happened upstairs?" And they said, "No, actually it's just people got cut up with glass and stuff, but nobody had... people's tympanic membranes are ruptured, things like that, but nobody died." And I said, "Oh, that's wow, how could they bomb the hospital directly right into a ward and no one died?" Well, right as I thought that, three guys ran down the stairs with a body wrapped up in a sheet and I said, "Oh, go over to the trauma bay." And when I pulled the drape off of him, I realized it was Ibrahim.
His abdomen was ripped open. His colostomy was torn in half. He'd probably died instantly in the blast. And you can imagine, I was furious. I don't think I've ever been angrier than that. It's not very common to have your patient who was blown up to begin with, and that's why he needed surgery, then be blown up in his hospital bed. I'm not sure if any other Western doctor actually has had that experience, but I was beside myself. I was just really, really pissed off. But this kid, Mohammed, still needed an operation upstairs.
So I went upstairs and I said, "All right, well, he's not dead yet. Let's move over to the OR." And we did, and he actually ended up doing fine. And after his, I don't remember if it was his dad or his uncle, but somebody came in, was at his bedside a few days later and I told him, "Mohammed saved my life by bleeding." And he said, "What do you mean?" Well, if I hadn't come into the ICU, I would've been down in Ibrahim's room when it exploded. But anyway, operating on Mohammed while I was that angry just took a lot of... I had to keep slowing myself down.
I had to be like, "Feroze, you're like, you're taking your anger out on this kid's spleen, that's not good." So yeah, that was the most challenging thing. There's been a lot of surgical innovation in Gaza. I think maybe most people would be esoteric for them, but whoever asked the question, just come find me afterwards if you're interested or just email me. Happy to talk about it.
Nora Jacobsen Ben Hammed:
So this seems an appropriate follow-up. Recalling these events, you seem outraged, but calm. How did you manage to operate on patient after patient calmly?
Feroze Sidhwa:
Calmly? Well, I wasn't calm in that particular operation, I'll tell you. But I think that's just a side effect of surgical training. You got to remember, I know for, and I don't say this to sound grandiose, but I know for most of you, the blood and the guts would bother you a lot, but it doesn't bother me because that's what I do on a daily basis. Not to that degree, obviously, not with those kinds of injuries, but I'm used to seeing people screaming in pain. I'm used to seeing limbs hanging off. I mean, even with kids, I work... The San Joaquin County, just east of here, is one of the most violent counties in the country, and Stockton is one of the most violent cities in the country.
And so I actually, I deal with children who are shot pretty regularly. So it wasn't that aspect of it that bothered me. What angers me is knowing that we're responsible for, or not we, knowing that I'm responsible for. I remember March 18th of this year was the day that the widespread bombing of Gaza resumed. I don't like saying the ceasefire ended because there wasn't really one, but on March 18th, the widespread bombing of Gaza resumed. It was 2:30 in the morning, we were all asleep and the bombing was so... the bombing was nowhere near the hospital actually, but it was so many bombs dropped at the same time that the door to our living quarters actually blew open and like smashed into the cabinet right behind it.
And it was a room full of bunk beds for all the doctors that were at Nasser Hospital. So we all woke up like, "Holy crap, what just happened?" And then we heard the bombing ongoing, so we all went down to the emergency room. So I'm a trauma surgeon, but basically that means my job is to stop someone from bleeding to death. That's what I'm best at. And so we went into what's called the red triage area where the most seriously injured patients are. And the first thing we did for about 10 minutes was just pronounce kids dead and just move them out because we needed space. You got to have some space, some personnel to do something.
And most of these kids actually were not dead yet, but it was just obvious that there was no way to save their lives. They either had transcranial injuries, whatever it might have been. They just had wounds that they wouldn't be able to be... There was no way at Nauser Medical Complex that we could have saved them. If it was one kid that had come in, yeah, we would have worked on them no matter what. But in a mass casualty event, you kind of have to pick and choose so that the most people can live. But the first person I found that could live that day was a five-year-old girl. Her name turned out to be Sham.
And when I was, I found her, she was on the floor, nobody was with her, and she just had this little trickle of blood coming out of her left cheek, but she was unconscious. So kids have big heads, right? So if they're just put on the floor, they do this, and they can't breathe very well. So I just kind of pulled her jaw forward, like if you've ever taken a CPR class, they teach you how to do that, right? Jaw thrusting. So I just pulled her jaw forward, and she was able to breathe on her own. So I said, "Okay, maybe this, she obviously has a brain injury from this piece of shrapnel here, but maybe it's survivable. Who knows?"
So I picked her up, undressed her. She had a wound to her left chest and a wound to her abdomen as well. So I took her to the operating room. I put a chest tube in her and removed her spleen that was bleeding. But the brain injury, there isn't really much we could do about it. And eventually, actually, she got significantly better. But anyway, sorry, I got off track with that story. But when I was jaw-thrusting her on the ground, some of the nurses were trying to make some space so that we could pick her up and put her on a stretcher. And I was looking at this little trickle of blood coming out of her cheek, and I just thought, did I pay for the shrapnel that's in her face, or did my neighbor, or did you, or did you?
That's what bothers me. And that's what should bother all of us. Again, we can blame the Israelis all we want, but one of us paid for that shrapnel. No Israeli paid for it, I can guarantee you that. An Israeli might have dropped it, but it's a minor point. So I guess that's why I stay, or I don't know if that explains why I stay calm. That seems to explain why I would get angry. But it's not a, if you want to do that work, you'll just learn to be calm in that environment, I guess, is the way to say it. And also, I got to be honest, the Palestinians... I was with a Palestinian surgeon who is fairly well known, named Khaled Alser.
And he works at Nasser, and I was there with him. And he was leading the mass casualty event at the, so basically on March 18th. So we saw 221 trauma patients that morning, like between 2:00 and 10:00 a.m. It was completely insane. He was leading this, meaning that he was the one out front. He's 10 years younger than I am. He's only been out of residency for two years. He was leading that mass casualty, meaning every ambulance that came, or donkey cart, or whatever it was, he would look at it and say, "Those go to the morgue. Those go inside to the green zone. That one goes to the red zone. Everyone shut up and do what I said." Now, obviously, I can't do this because, again, I don't speak the language.
I don't know the culture at all. But that's what he would do. Forty-five minutes into this eight-hour exercise, his father-in-law's body was brought to him. All he did was stand aside for about ten seconds, say, I assume, a prayer, he's a religious fellow, and then go back to work. And he went to his father-in-law's grave 12 hours later, after he'd already been buried. So if they can do it, and he's been doing this for two years straight, six months of which was spent being tortured in Israeli prison, having his ribs broken, being starved, being infected with scabies, all sorts of horrendous things that... So if he can do it for two years, and in fact for his entire life, I can do it for five weeks.
Nora Jacobsen Ben Hammed:
An unlikely issue. By any chance, did you have any opportunity to speak with an Israeli involved in any of the mass atrocities?
Feroze Sidhwa:
Sorry, say it again. Unlike?
Nora Jacobsen Ben Hammed:
Unlikely issue. This was the ...
Feroze Sidhwa:
Oh, oh, gotcha, gotcha. So, who have been involved directly in these atrocities? Not to my knowledge. I do, I'll tell you two stories. Just to be clear, I'll only tell these stories because the question was asked, but I just want to emphasize Israel is going to do whatever the Israelis are going to do. And people probably, again, it's very easy to forget Joe Biden, but Biden, I think, probably just kind of sleepwalked into saying that he would cut off arms to Israel if Israel invaded Rafah. I don't know if anybody remembers this back in May of last year or something. And Netanyahu famously said, "If the US cuts off weapons, Israel will fight with its fingernails."
And I remember thinking, "Good, you go do that." No, really. I mean, I'm just being honest. Good. You go fight with your fingernails, and you see how far you get doing that, and then you'll realize, oh, we're not all-powerful, and we actually need to come to an accommodation with these people instead of just murdering them until we feel good about ourselves. That's just the situation. So I just want to emphasize, I'm happy to talk about Israeli society. I do know it a little bit. In fact, I've lived in Israel for a lot longer than I've spent in the Palestinian territory, but it's just none of this has to do with Israel.
It has to do with... For us, we are the ones that we have to focus on ourselves, because we can, the positive thing, if there is a positive thing about this, is that if we decided to stop being involved in this insanity, it would stop instantaneously. If the Germans decided to cut off their arms, which of course they should, the Israelis could keep doing what they're doing. If the Brits decided to cut off their arms, the Israelis could keep doing what they're doing. If we did, they have to stop. And they know that. They know that full well. They're not idiots.
But anyway, so the story, I've had two interviews on Israel's Channel 13 news, which is not the ultra-right, but the less ultra-right, I guess. The first one was interesting, actually. It was rather, it was not an oppositional interview because the guy who was doing it is actually an anti-Netanyahu crusader. So he was really just looking for anything that'll piss people off about what Netanyahu's doing, he was happy to talk about. But the second one was much more oppositional, which I'm fine, it's fine. I was kind of surprised that the first one wasn't. So in the middle of the interview, it was about a 15-minute interview, and they played like seven or eight minutes of it.
In the middle of the interview, the guy says, "You were in these hospitals in Gaza. You must have seen Hamas running around all over the place, because we all know they're all over the hospitals in Gaza." And I just told him very straightforwardly, "No, I've never seen that, and neither has anyone else. It's an invention of the Israeli military." And he said, "You think they're lying?" And I said, "Look, man, it kind of grates me the wrong way that you're pretending that you don't know that the Israeli Defense Forces lie about things. My government lies about things, your government lies about things, everybody's government lies.
Your country is in a situation of war, it's completely normal for militaries to lie during wartime. I'm sure you agree with that." And now he's thinking, "Well, yeah, that's true." And so he said, "But haven't you seen all the videos?" And I said, "No, I haven't seen all the videos. I follow these matters very closely, and if you could send me the videos that you're talking about, I'd love to see them." I've never seen a video of Hamas in a hospital doing anything other than delivering a patient to the hospital. So, I was kind of curious if they would keep that in or not. And interestingly enough, they did not. No, no, no, but it's kind of interesting what they did keep in.
But the reason I mention it though is because during the interview, when they played, well, I'll talk about it in a second, what they played was that you guys, do people remember that famous CGI simulation video of the Hamas tunnels under Shifa Hospital that are just... It's clearly a CGI video. They're not trying to pretend that it's real. It's not like a deepfake or something like that. It's just a CGI video saying, "This is what we know is under Shifa Hospital." That's the video they played during the interview. And I just remember watching it later when it was actually broadcast. I watched it later. I was like, "What the hell is this guy doing?" He was adamant that there's all this video.
"We've got all this video evidence, don't you know?" It's just nonsense. But the interesting thing was what he kept in, or I shouldn't say him, I'm sure it was the producers, but what they kept in. So after that, I said, "But look, let's just agree to disagree about whether Hamas is in the hospitals in Gaza." In December of 2024, Benjamin Netanyahu had his prostate removed at, I think, Makassed Hospital in Jerusalem, one of the big hospitals in Jerusalem. And he was there for three or four days in the hospital, and by every account, he militarized that hospital. He was making command decisions from there. His generals were visiting him.
He held cabinet meetings in his room. By every account, he militarized the hospital. Does anyone think that means Hamas can bomb the hospital? It's ludicrous. That's insanity. That's not how hospitals work. That's not how international law works. The funny thing about what Israel's doing in Gaza is all of it is completely against Israeli, and even, I would say, American, but even Israeli military codes. It's all completely illegal, and they know it's illegal even according to their own laws. But nevertheless, surprisingly enough, they kept that in. But the guy's answer, which he actually didn't say at the time, they edited it in later, but his answer to this was, "Well, in Hebrew we have a saying: it's complicated."
It's not actually complicated, but this is just a way of... So there's a lot. The point is, in Israeli society, even in a media organization that is willing to have me on, there's a lot of hemming and hawing and just BS-ing, I guess you could say. Omer Bartov is an Israeli-American Holocaust and genocide scholar. Actually, he's a really remarkable human being, actually. He had a line in a New York Review of Books piece, I think it was there, but anyway, he had a line recently where he said, he was talking about this Israeli mentality of "We're not starving them." Well, okay.
Or no, the way he went through it is: "There's no starvation in Gaza, but the starvation in Gaza is being caused by Hamas." In other words, "We're not starving them, and it's good that we did." That was the way he summarized it. "We're not starving them, and it's good that we did." And it's kind of the same thing: "We're not murdering children, and it's good that we did." Everybody can see what's going on. Furthermore, Israelis are the ones putting it on their social media. If you look at the South African submission, which I can't say I've done extensively; it's like 4,000 pages long, but if you look at South Africa's, what I think will be their final submission to the International Court of Justice, in the genocide, their petition to the ICJ about Israel committing or violating the Genocide Convention, if you look at that, it's like half or a third of the evidence is Israeli social media accounts.
It's kind of amazing. There's just no law. And the other half is just statements of Israeli officials that were made publicly and forcefully and repeatedly and on camera and deliberate. It's not hidden. But anyway, after they played that interview on Channel 13, the way that show, I don't know what the show is called, but the way that show works is they have like five or six minutes of the guy interviewing somebody, and then there's a panel that reacts to the interview. And the interview, I had to get someone; I don't speak Hebrew, so I had to get somebody to translate it for me, but the interview, or the panel discussion is... it's pretty shocking, honestly.
I don't know how to describe it other than that. But there's a woman named Stella who just starts screaming like a lunatic. What she's screaming, and I had to ask two different people to translate this because I wanted to make sure I was actually... is the context what I think the context is?, she said, "This guy is like the rest of them," meaning me, "is like the rest of the world. They're spitting on us." And then she said, "No, they're not even spitting on us. They're pissing on us. And we Jews just like to put our heads down and pretend that it's raining outside." And I was like, "Okay, it's a weird analogy, but that's fine."
And then she went on to say, and I'm not quoting exactly, again, it's a translation, but she went on to say, "This guy was taking care of the terrorists in their incubators in the hospital." And I actually, again, I had to ask an Israeli native Hebrew speaker. I said, "Does that mean something else?" And they said, "No, she's saying that the babies in the incubators are terrorists." And to be fair, there's another woman on the panel who says something like, "Stella saying children are terrorists is not Jewish." And then she just keeps screaming about "the world's pissing on our heads." It's very unfortunate, but Israeli society has really gone off the rails in this regard.
And it's hardly because of October 7th. Anybody who says that, it's a nice thought, but it doesn't happen to be true. That didn't help matters, that's for sure, but it's hardly where the radicalization of Israeli society began or ended. But again, I just have to emphasize, and I know I'm already being a broken record, but I just have to emphasize none of that matters. What matters is what we are going to do. The Israelis are who they are. Furthermore, just to be clear, suppose you really care about Israeli society, I actually do. Again, I think I know about the same number of Israeli Jews as Palestinians.
And again, I lived in Israel for... I lived in Haifa for about a year after I graduated from college. If you care about Israeli society, you really have to ask yourself, is it pro-Israel to keep pouring weapons into this ethnic-supremacist fire that is going on there? I mean, I don't think so. That's just my judgment; I can't prove it. But when you think of Jews, do you think of people who enjoy shooting and starving children? It's hardly what I think of.
I think of people who participate in American life in general, who are kind of left-liberals or have a humane and decent outlook on life; a long religious tradition that's kind of been modified over the years to go from being kind of anti-humanist to now being really quite aggressively humanist. I think of somebody like Peter Beinart. And again, it's just me. I mean, I can't tell Jews what they ought to be, that's not my role, but I certainly don't think that by empowering the worst, most lunatically violent elements in Israeli society, and just remember, they're not just going after Palestinians, that's hardly the case, I don't see how that's pro-Israel.
Whenever I actually write about this and I say "pro-Israel," I put the pro in quotes, because it's just not... Like I mentioned, I was reading, or I was telling somebody I was reading, Chomsky's Fateful Triangle on the way when I was flying back from New York yesterday, and he pointed out, and this is written in 1983, but he pointed out that people who call themselves supporters of Israel are actually supporting Israel's ultimate destruction. I think that's pretty clear. And furthermore, why are they doing it? Are they doing it because they think this is the only way?
No, they're doing it to make sure that the US can continue controlling the Middle East by force. I don't think those are good reasons at all. I certainly don't see how they're pro-Israel. I don't see how they're pro-Jewish or pro-human life or anything else. So yeah, again, just to emphasize, we should focus on ourselves, and that's important.
Nora Jacobsen Ben Hammed:
So I want to reassure everyone, it's being recorded, it will be publicly available. I imagine people who are registered will get an email when it's up, and we have some time afterwards if anyone wants to speak with Dr. Sidhwa about the work that he does. I know that there are also people training to be doctors who may wish to explore this kind of path. And let's thank him for his time.
