Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, an American trauma surgeon volunteering in southern Gaza, recounted in a statement to Antiwar.com what he experienced on Tuesday morning when Israel resumed its massive bombing campaign on the Strip, killing over 400 Palestinians, including scores of women and children.
Sidhwa said he and the medical team at the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis operated “almost exclusively on women and children.”
He told Antiwar.com that the first patient he found was a girl aged three or four “with agonal breathing and a weak pulse with multiple shrapnel wounds to the head and face” and that he had to tell her father that she wouldn’t survive.
Here is Dr. Sidhwa’s full statement:
On the morning of March 18, 2025, I was volunteering at Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, Gaza. At about 2:30 am, Israel began bombarding Gaza again, as usual under transparently absurd pretexts. Apparently this was coordinated with the White House in advance, revealing how deeply involved in these crimes our own government is. I woke up with a start when the door to our bedroom living quarters was blown open and smashed into the closet behind it.
I went down to the emergency department to help with the mass casualty event that we knew would follow. The Palestinian surgeon and nursing leader who led the mass casualty effort did an incredible job of controlling the situation and triaging patients. I went to the red triage area with Dr. Morgan McMonagle, an Irish trauma and vascular surgeon. The first patient I found was a 3-4-year-old girl with agonal breathing and a weak pulse with multiple shrapnel wounds to the head and face. I told her father that she was going to die and there was nothing we could do about it.
Next, Morgan was evaluating a 6-year-old boy with shrapnel injuries to the chest, abdomen, and left leg. He went to surgery for an exploratory laparotomy, which thankfully revealed no significant abdominal bleeding. We found his popliteal artery transected, and thankfully, Dr. McMonagle was able to repair it primarily.
I then moved on to an exploratory laparotomy on a 29-year-old woman, I later found out that she was the sister of one of the physicians whom I work with here. Her sacrum, the bone in your pelvis that connects the pelvis to the spine, had a tennis-ball-sized hole in it, as did the skin and muscle of her lower back, from which she was bleeding tremendously. Her rectum was torn in half, and her vagina and bladder were both injured. We were able to get her out of the operating room and to the ICU successfully, but she died over the next 12 hours.
We then dealt with a 6-year-old boy hit by two pieces of shrapnel in the right ventricle of his heart, leading to cardiac tamponade. His heart stopped on the way up to the operating room. Dr. McMonagle opened his chest, repaired the heart, and was actually able to get his heart restarted. We then explored the child’s abdomen, finding a massive right-sided liver injury, three holes in his stomach, two in his colon, and five in his small intestine. He was certainly the most severely injured child I have ever encountered who was not already dead. We were able to get him out of the operating room and into the ICU, but he also died 12 hours later.
The night continued on in this vein: we operated almost exclusively on women and children, and we had no indication that the small smattering of men who were injured were combatants.
Americans should immediately stop providing the crucial military, diplomatic, and economic support that makes these crimes possible. Hamas has already agreed to a three-phase ceasefire that involves the return of all Israeli hostages, and by all accounts, Hamas has adhered to the deal. Anyone who reads the Israeli press knew that Israel’s plan from the start was to never enter phase two of the ceasefire deal, just like Israel has failed to adhere to any ceasefire signed with Hamas since 2004. The United States is a sworn guarantor of the January 19 ceasefire agreement, and our assistance in helping Israel violate it is thus doubly illegal. I hope people will do whatever they can in this crucial moment.
Dr. Sidhwa was also interviewed on Sky News about the massive Israeli bombing, which can be found here.
Sidhwa previously volunteered in Gaza in March and April of 2024 and helped bring attention to the crimes committed against Palestinian children he and other American healthcare workers witnessed.
In October 2024, Sidhwa and 98 other American healthcare workers sent an open letter to President Biden urging him to end military aid to Israel. The letter said that each healthcare worker who “worked in an emergency, intensive care, or surgical setting treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head or chest on a regular or even a daily basis.”
Last year, Sidhwa appeared on Antiwar.com’s podcast and YouTube show, Antiwar News With Dave DeCamp, to discuss his experience the first time he volunteered in Gaza. Sidhwa is a long-time reader of Antiwar.com and previously wrote a fundraiser letter for the site.
