A group of 152 American healthcare workers who have volunteered in Gaza signed an open letter to President Trump calling on him to cut off all military and diplomatic support for Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinian population of the besieged territory.
Many of the healthcare workers who signed the letter have served in other conflict zones around the world, but they said the “scale of violence directed at Gaza’s civilians is unlike anything” they have ever seen. They described in the letter the atrocities they witnessed, including the massive violence inflicted on children.
“Half of Gaza’s population is children, and we routinely treated them for every possible type of injury: 100% total body surface area burns, dismemberment, gunshots to the head and chest, evisceration, and even traumatic hemicorporectomy and decapitation. We have even seen these injuries in fetuses, whose mothers’ bodies could not protect their unborn children from the American-made bombs dropped on them by Israeli forces. Most of us saw pre-teen children shot in the head or chest on a regular basis, often multiple times per day,” the healthcare workers said.
“Today, we beg you to hear the cries of Gaza’s children that our consciences will not let us forget. We cannot fathom why our government continues arming Israel while its armed forces kill children en masse,” they added.
The letter says that the healthcare workers who have been in Gaza since the establishment of the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) have treated many Palestinians attacked by Israeli forces while attempting to get food.
“Whenever any GHF site opens, the day’s events are entirely predictable: within one hour, the nearest hospitals will be flooded with hundreds of wounded aid seekers. Each one of these mass casualty events instantly overwhelmed the already massively overcrowded and under-resourced facilities. Many patients are dead on arrival or have injuries that are beyond the capabilities of Gaza’s healthcare system,” the letter reads.
The healthcare workers called the GHF a “humanitarian abomination” and a “uniquely cruel tool of coercion that the American taxpayer should not be funding and that Americans should not be staffing.”
The letter also details the widespread disease and malnutrition in Gaza. “Today virtually everyone in Gaza is visibly malnourished. We watched our own colleagues lose consciousness at work from malnutrition and dehydration, eating virtually nothing as they gave all available sustenance to their children,” the healthcare workers said.
The letter also warns that the number of malnutrition deaths released by the Gaza Health Ministry is likely a huge undercount, noting that “the number of starvation cases reported by the medical system in a humanitarian crisis is usually less than 10% of the true number of deaths caused by starvation.”
The healthcare workers also addressed Israel’s systematic destruction of hospitals in Gaza and attacks on healthcare workers, and rejected the IDF’s justification for the campaign.
“The 152 signatories to this letter spent more than 460 weeks inside Gaza’s hospitals and clinics. We wish to be clear: not once did any of us see any type of Palestinian militant activity in any of Gaza’s hospitals or other healthcare facilities. We urge you to see that Israel has systematically devastated Gaza’s entire healthcare system and targeted our colleagues for torture, disappearance, and murder on an unprecedented scale, not because it was militarily necessary but in order to destroy that system’s ability to save lives.
The healthcare workers concluded the letter by calling for all restrictions on aid and medical supplies entering Gaza to be lifted, and with another appeal for Trump to end support for Israel. “Every day that we continue supplying weapons and munitions to Israel is another day that men and women are shredded by our bombs and children are murdered with our bullets. Another day that children starve in their helpless mothers’ arms. President Trump, we urge you: end this madness now!” the letter concludes.
