RENO
American general, trauma, and critical care surgeon, Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, joined CODEPINK, a peace and social justice organization, on Aug. 13 to discuss the impact of Israeli forces on healthcare in Gaza. Without international journalists present, doctors, nurses, and aid workers have become the world’s point of information in the Gaza strip.
As a humanitarian surgeon, Palestine is only one of many conflict-torn places Sidhwa has treated patients. He has also volunteered in Ukraine, Haiti, Zimbabwe, and more. On his first mission to Gaza, he treated a 9-year-old girl who was suffering from sepsis and unknown injuries from a bomb.
Once he was able to inspect her injuries and peel back the bandages on her abdomen, he said maggots spilled out of her side, which had been stapled shut because the surgeon who should have been on duty had been killed. Then, because there were too many patients for the doctors to handle, the girl had been left for days on end without any treatment. The same girl, Sidhwa said, somehow still had her leg attached. Treating her to the extent of his capability took 30 to 40 hours of surgery.
Sidhwa continued on, saying that she is now in Egypt and needs to have her leg amputated. Many other children haven’t made it. The ones who have been maimed — and he said Gaza easily has the most child amputees out of anywhere in the world — can’t be taken care of and won’t survive. Sidhwa spoke of two children sharing a wheelchair and being allowed to leave Gaza accompanied by their aunt, whose own 6-month-old baby was denied the same right by Israel.
Sidhwa’s most recent time volunteering in Gaza was this April, and he is slated to go back again this year despite noting that more aid workers have been killed in Gaza than anywhere else in the world. Having also volunteered in Ukraine during its ongoing conflict with Russia, Sidhwa said the rate of healthcare workers being killed in Gaza is easily 110 times the rate in Ukraine. He said that every person in charge of every hospital in Gaza has either been arrested or killed.
Sidhwa shared an insurmountable level of cruelty faced by Gazans. He described the atrocities inflicted on patients, many of whom will never recover mentally or physically; the rampant starvation and thirst and aid organization’s inability to assure food for volunteers; children shot in the head; children bleeding out on hospital floors crowded with hundreds of other people; hospitals functioning well-beyond capacity; and how, plainly, no amount of medical care can fix Gaza.
He said that Americans and the world are nowhere near doing everything they can.
~ MR
