Photo by Shepherd Express Staff
Dr. Feroze Sidwha - Redeemer Lutheran Church
Dr. Feroze Sidwha recounts his experiences in Gaza at Redeemer Lutheran Church in Milwaukee on July 27, 2025
California-based trauma and critical care surgeon Dr. Feroze Sidhwa has worked in hospitals in Gaza twice since Israel’s ongoing assault since October 7, 2023. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he affirmed, speaking at Redeemer Lutheran Church in Milwaukee on Sunday, July 27. The Wisconsin Coalition for Justice in Palestine welcomed Sidhwa this weekend to share his first-hand experience treating Palestinian patients as well as witnessing Israel’s targeted attacks on healthcare workers.
Gaza’s entire 2.1 million population currently faces starvation, with the World Health Organization reporting that three quarters of Palestinians in Gaza are catastrophically malnourished. But hundreds of trucks carrying humanitarian aid in the form of food, baby formula and medical supplies have been blocked from entering Gaza by Israel, with the Rafah Crossing and Philadelphi Corridor sealed off.
Healthcare Workers Targeted
Save the Children International reported last year that healthcare workers in Gaza have been targeted with attacks at a rate higher than anywhere in the world. Few functioning hospitals remain in Gaza, and even those left are damaged, overcrowded or running dangerously low on supplies.
Sidhwa, who has previously volunteered in Haiti, Ukraine, Burkina Faso and Zimbabwe, was in Gaza from March 25 to April 8 last year and then again from March 3 to April 1 this year. During his first trip, while volunteering at European Hospital in Khan Yunis, he recalls treating a young girl who had been critically wounded from an explosion with exposed-bone injuries to her legs and buttocks, infested with maggots. The doctor who had been on call to help the girl had been killed, and medical students had done the best they could to patch up her wounds. Sidhwa and his team were able to save the girl from going into sepsis and successfully treated her injuries.
On another occasion, Sidhwa treated a fellow doctor who had been shot in the knee by an Israeli soldier while trying to finish an operation on a wounded patient. The doctor was then taken to a torture chamber, where he was beaten so badly that he permanently lost sight in one eye. He was detained for 45 days before being released on the side of the road, where Sidhwa had found and subsequently treated him. “He’s 29 now, but he looks like he’s 80,” Sidhwa described the doctor. “He is physically and spiritually traumatized. He has no idea if his wife or children are alive.”
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Shockingly Illegal
During Sidhwa’s second trip, on the early morning of March 18, he had been treating the wounds of a teenaged boy before briefly leaving the surgical unit to check on another patient. While making his way back to the unit, an Israeli bomb struck the hospital, killing the boy and another patient. This incident, which Sidhwa also discussed on Democracy Now!, happened because Israel was targeting the other patient, a 56 year old man named Ismail Barhoum, due to alleged Hamas ties. “You don’t kill combatants in hospitals,” Sidhwa made clear. “It’s widespread in Gaza, and it’s shockingly illegal.”
Sidhwa plans to volunteer in Gaza for a third time this October. However, while emergency medical teams are still being allowed in, most medical equipment is not. “A colleague of mine couldn’t bring in his basic medical equipment because it was made of metal,” Sidhwa remembered.
As a trauma surgeon, Sidhwa specializes in stopping patients from bleeding to death, but it is difficult to do reconstruction because of limited medical supplies in Gaza. Additionally, neurosurgeons or orthopaedic surgeons are most qualified to treat explosion or burn victims, but there is a massive shortage of them in Gaza, and most orthopaedic equipment is either gone or not being allowed in.
War on Children
Philippe Lazzarini of United Nations Relief & Work Agency (UNRWA) said last December that Gaza now has the highest number of child amputees per capita in the world, noting that many children are forced to undergo surgery without anesthesia. Sidhwa himself mentioned that he dealt with thirteen different cases of children being targeted in Israeli sniper attacks.
“It’s a war on children,” Sidhwa stated. “I don’t know how you could describe it any other way. If it was an attack on Hamas, children wouldn’t be getting shot in the head.”
Below is an excerpt from an open letter last October that Sidwa and 99 fellow physicians, surgeons, nurses and other volunteers in Gaza wrote to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris:
“With only marginal exceptions, everyone in Gaza is sick, injured, or both. While working in Gaza we saw widespread malnutrition in our patients and our Palestinian healthcare colleagues. Every one of us lost weight rapidly in Gaza despite having privileged access to food and having taken our own supplementary nutrient-dense food with us. We have photographic evidence of life-threatening malnutrition in our patients, especially children, that we are eager to share with you.
“Virtually every child under the age of five whom we encountered, both inside and outside of the hospital, had both a cough and watery diarrhea. We found cases of jaundice (indicating hepatitis A infection under such conditions) in nearly every room of the hospitals in which we served, and in many of our healthcare colleagues in Gaza. An astonishingly high percentage of our surgical incisions became infected from the combination of malnutrition, impossible operating conditions, lack of basic sanitation supplies such as soap, and lack of surgical supplies and medications, including antibiotics.
“Malnutrition led to widespread spontaneous abortions, underweight newborns, and an inability of new mothers to breastfeed. This left their newborns at high risk of death given the lack of access to potable water anywhere in Gaza. Many of those infants died. In Gaza we watched malnourished mothers feed their underweight newborns infant formula made with poisonous water. We can never forget that the world abandoned these innocent women and babies.”
In spite of the ongoing assault by Israel being widely documented by journalists and on social media, the U.S. has continued to give billions of dollars in weapons sales to Israel, directly funded by U.S. taxpayers. According to Sidhwa, the U.S. gives to Israel only about 72 hours worth of fuel and munitions with each package, so if the U.S. would cut off military aid, Israel would be forced to quickly halt its siege.
Sidhwa reckons that one of the best things Americans can do is for medical societies and unions to raise awareness about Israel’s targeted killings of healthcare workers and journalists in Gaza.
“We don’t have to participate in these things,” Sidhwa said. “If we stop participating, it’ll stop happening.”
Local grassroots organization Healthcare Workers for Palestine Milwaukee has launched a Boycotts, Divestments & Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Teva, a pharmaceutical company complicit in Israel’s occupation of Palestine and medical apartheid system. Additionally, the group Milwaukee 4 Palestine is engaged in a similar campaign against Milwaukee-based weapons manufacturer Derco Aerospace, which repairs Israel’s F-16 fighter jets.
