Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, an American trauma surgeon volunteering in Gaza, told Antiwar.com that he came close to being hit by an Israeli airstrike that targeted the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis on Sunday night and killed a 16-year-old boy he was treating.
Sidhwa said that he was on his way to the male surgical ward, which was hit by the Israeli airstrike, when someone asked him to help with a patient who was bleeding in the ICU.
“So I went in there and helped, and about 10 minutes later, the explosion happened,” Sidhwa said. “So I probably would have been standing right next to Ibrahim, the boy [who died].”
Sidhwa said that he planned to change the boy’s medical dressing. “I probably would have been standing next to him and talking to his family when that explosion happened if they hadn’t pulled me into the unit like that,” he said.
The bombing also killed Ismail Barhoum, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, who was being treated at the hospital. The Israeli military took credit for the strike and said Barhoum was the target.
Sidhwa pointed out that it would never be acceptable for Hamas to target an Israeli official receiving treatment at a hospital. “You can’t bomb hospitals just because there are people in there that you suspect of being criminals or even being a threat to you,” he said.
“Benjamin Netanyahu stands accused of genocide and many other crimes, and he had his prostate taken out in late December. He was in the hospital for four days. Nobody could have possibly imagined that Hamas would be allowed to bomb the hospital where he was and that people would say, ‘Oh yeah, that was legitimate,'” Sidhwa added.
Sidhwa said the strike was the first time one of his patients was “killed by violence in a hospital bed” and called for the US to stop arming Israel. “We just need to stop, we just need to stop, we just need to stop,” he said, referring to the US government supplying bombs to Israel.
Last week, Sidhwa detailed his experience when Israel restarted its massive bombing campaign in Gaza on March 11, saying that he and other medical staff at the Nasser Hospital operated “almost exclusively on women and children.”
Other doctors working in Gaza reported similar experiences when the bombing restarted. “At no point were there less than 65 people in ER, all with open wounds, mainly women and children … The floor was awash with blood,” Dr. Mark Perlmutter, another American volunteer who was working at al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in central Gaza at the time, told The Guardian.
