“We told his dad to pick him up and take him over to the area where dead kids are allowed to die with their families.” - Dr. Feroze Sidhwa
With the sun setting over Gaza’s skyline and warplanes flying overhead, trauma surgeon Dr. Feroze Sidhwa and orthopedic surgeon Dr. Mark Perlmutter huddle in front of their webcam at Nasser Hospital in the south of Gaza to describe some of the horrors they have seen over the last week.
“We're losing friends all the time. We all have medical student friends that we befriended last year that are now dead,” Dr. Perlmutter tells Mehdi, adding that the dire situation at the hospital has left it remarkably compromised. “I would clean a patient's arm before I repaired a broken elbow on a baby with tap water. They received no antibiotics, and their supplies are as bad as they were a year ago.”
Dr. Sidhwa, meanwhile, had a closer-than-usual brush with death this week when an Israeli airstrike on the hospital killed his 17-year-old patient, “He would have gone home yesterday, the day after the bombing,” says Dr. Sidhwa, who was contacted by the US embassy after his tweet on the attack, pointing out how he was almost killed by the Israeli airstrike, garnered over a million views on Twitter.
“I got a call from the US Embassy after I sent out that tweet, because I think people saw it, and the lady said, ‘Hi, this is the embassy. We just want to make sure you're okay.’ And I was like, yeah, I'm fine. If you want to be sure I stay okay, maybe you could ask the Israelis not to bomb Nasser Hospital again, and I swear to God, she goes, ‘Actually, that's not our role, sorry.’”
For both doctors, this is not their first mission to Gaza since the genocide began in 2023, and much of the carnage, death, and destruction they saw the first time persists. “Just like when we were here last year, 40% to 50% of the casualties we're seeing, and most of the severely injured casualties, are kids,” says Dr. Sidhwa.
Watch the full interview above to hear the heartbreaking stories that both doctors share with Mehdi, including how Dr. Perlmutter was forced to use a drill bit to fix a child’s fractured arm, and how Dr. Sidhwa treated a family attacked by an Israeli Apache helicopter. They also tackle the Israeli claim that Hamas fighters are hiding in Gaza’s hospitals.
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