On May 28, testifying before the UN Security Council, U.S. surgeon Dr. Feroze Sidhwa laid bare the ongoing horrors being carried out in Gaza, speaking as an eyewitness to Israel’s incessant bombings, killings, and deliberate starvation. Sidhwa, a trauma surgeon from California, has twice volunteered to work in Gaza over the last 600 days of terror. He told the diplomats, “During mass casualty events, we dealt with the rain of fire and death falling around us everywhere.” Noting that on March 18, the day the Israelis violated the ceasefire, “That day I witnessed the most extreme mass casualty event of my career. At Nasser Medical Complex, 221 trauma patients arrived in one morning. Ninety were dead on arrival, nearly half were severely injured children.”
His testimony was stark, “During the five weeks I spent in Gaza, I didn’t see or treat a single combatant. My patients were six-year-old children with shrapnel in their hearts and bullets in their brains, pregnant women with shattered pelvises and fetuses split in two in the womb.”
Sidhwa detailed the fracturing of all civil norms. “The children died, not because their injuries were insurmountable, but because we lacked blood, antibiotics, and the most basic supplies readily available in any major hospital in the world.” Further, he said, “Children are supposed to be protected. In Gaza, these protections are simply gone. Every day, the distinction between combatant and civilian is erased. Most of my patients were preteen children, their bodies shattered by explosives and torn by flying metal. Many died. Those who lived often awoke to find their entire families gone.” Many of these “survivors” asked, “Why didn’t I die” with my family? Sidhwa asked, “I wonder if any member of this Council has ever met a five-year-old child who no longer wants to live.”
He insisted, “The medical system has not failed. It has been systematically dismantled through a sustained military campaign that has willfully violated international humanitarian law. Civilians are now dying, not just from the constant airstrikes, but from acute malnutrition, sepsis, exposure and despair.”
Dr. Sidhwa, who has twice addressed the International Peace Coalition co-initiated by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, Schiller Institute founder, concluded with demands that the UNSC secure a ceasefire, halt arms transfers, guarantee medical evacuations, and ensure sustained humanitarian access, reported Türkiye’s Anadolu Agency. “If this Council remains silent and fails to act now, that record will stand as a testament to a global failure to provide urgent care and to the collapse of our collective conscience.”
