The 10-minute segment on “Children of Gaza” in CBS News’s July 21 “Sunday Morning” program, broadcast the Sunday before Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s July 24 lying diatribe before the U.S. Congress, centered on an interview with Dr, Mark Perlmutter, a North Carolina orthopedic surgeon and a Vice President of the International College of Surgeons, recounting what he had seen in his two-week medical mission in Gaza in May of this year. Every Congressman and -woman who stood and cheered Netanyahu’s speech should be required to hear Dr. Perlmutter’s testimony in person.
In all of his 40 mission trips, over 30 years, to disaster zones, combined, he said he had never seen “the level of carnage” against civilians that he witnessed in just his first week in Gaza. The casualties were almost entirely children: incinerated children, “shredded children,” children with wounds that were unmistakably from sniper bullets—some shot twice. What did he mean by “shredded children”? Children “missing body parts, being crushed by buildings, the greatest majority, or bomb explosions, the next greatest majority.”
CBS reporter Tracy Smith questioned his report that children in Gaza are being shot by snipers. “Definitively,” he replied. “I have two children that I have photographs of that were shot so perfectly in the chest, I couldn’t put my stethoscope over their heart more accurately, and directly on the side of the head, in the same child. No toddler gets shot twice by mistake by the ‘world’s best sniper.’ And they’re dead-center shots.”
Netanyahu told the U.S. Congress that there is plenty of food in Gaza. Dr. Perlmutter, when asked how many children in Gaza are in danger of starvation, replied: “All of them. Absolutely all of them.”
Dr. Perlmutter and Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a Californian trauma and critical care surgeon who participated in the same mission to Gaza, described in greater detail the conditions that left them with nightmares on their return, in an article published in Politico July 19.