By MARK PERLMUTTER and FEROZE SIDHWA
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The Israeli savagery in Gaza has reached such levels of sociopathy that Western media—loyal tools of the imperialist oligarchy—are having trouble hiding the truth, as they usually do, and cracks are appearing in their coverage. This is one example. The reasons why they are doing this are complicated and belong in a separate article, which we hope to do in the near future. In any case, we are glad that Politico decided to run this material. It is desperately needed. And, of course, speaking for our audience, our gratitude and admiration for Drs Perlmutter and Sidhwa is beyond measure. —The Editor
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None of this would have happened if the corporate media had been doing journalism instead of disinformation from the start.
We Volunteered at a Gaza Hospital. What We Saw Was Unspeakable.
American surgeons who witnessed the [Palestinian] civilian carnage of the Israel-Hamas war.
Illustration by Erin Aulov/POLITICO (source images via Mark Pearlmutter and Feroze Sidhwa)
GAZA — In the United States we would never dream of operating on anyone without consent, let alone a malnourished and barely conscious 9-year-old girl in septic shock. Nevertheless, when we saw Juri, that’s exactly what we did.
We have no idea how Juri ended up in the Gaza European Hospital preoperative area. All we could see was that she had an external fixator — a scaffold of metal pins and rods — on her left leg and necrotic skin on her face and arms from the explosion that tore her little body to shreds. Just touching her blankets elicited shrieks of pain and terror. She was slowly dying, so we decided to take the risk of anesthetizing her without knowing exactly what we would find.
In the operating room, we examined Juri from head to toe. This beautiful, meek little girl was missing two inches of her left femur along with most of the muscle and skin on the back of her thigh. Both of her buttocks were flayed open, cutting so deeply through flesh that the lowest bones in her pelvis were exposed. As we swept our hands through this topography of cruelty, maggots fell in clumps onto the operating room table.
“Jesus Christ,” Feroze muttered as we washed the larvae into a bucket, “she’s just a fucking kid.”
The two of us are humanitarian surgeons. Together, in our combined 57 years of volunteering, we’ve worked on more than 40 surgical missions in developing countries on four continents. We’re used to working in disaster and war zones, of being on intimate terms with death and carnage and despair.
None of that prepared us for what we saw in Gaza this spring.
The constant begging for money, the malnourished population, the open sewage — all of that was familiar to us as veteran war zone doctors. But add in the incredible population density, the overwhelming numbers of badly maimed children and amputees, the constant hum of drones, the smell of explosives and gunpowder — not to mention the constant earth-shaking explosions — and it’s no wonder UNICEF has declared the Gaza Strip as “the world’s most dangerous place to be a child.”
We have always gone where we were most needed. In March, it was obvious that the place was the Gaza Strip.
The two of us had never met before this trip. But we both felt called to serve, so we packed our bags, leaving our lives behind in California and North Carolina.
We landed in Cairo around midnight and met up with the rest of our group of 12: an emergency nurse, a physical therapist, an anesthesiologist, another trauma surgeon, a general surgeon, a neurosurgeon, two cardiac surgeons and two pulmonary and critical care intensivists. All of us had volunteered to work with the World Health Organization through the Palestinian American Medical Association.
We find it instructive that the Gaza atrocities have reached such a level that, as expressed elsewhere, leading members of the Western mainstream media, including POLITICO, are now slowly publishing stories reflecting much of the truth about Gaza. CNN, usually a reliable megaphone for Zionist, imperial/warmongering propaganda, has done this already regarding Gaza (but not the Ukraine), and CBS, also a longstanding and highly reliable platform for hegemonist status quo lies, recently ran a segment that was certainly an example of what good journalism should be. (Please see: Children of Gaza (CBS Sunday Morning—Jul 21-2024)). We don't know if this trend will continue. Or how deeply this new, however sporadic, serious journalism phenomenon will go. The largely invisible powers that be have a huge investment in the current unipolar status quo, so narrative control is indispensable for the sustenance of their regime. They will surely find ways to keep manipulating this narrative to insure the perpetuation of their legitimacy.
We were the only two surgeons in the group with experience in disaster zones. We were also the only two on the trip who didn’t speak Arabic, were not of Arab origin and were not Muslim. Mark is an orthopedic surgeon who grew up in a Jewish family in Penns Grove, New Jersey. Feroze is a trauma surgeon who grew up in a Parsi household in Flint, Michigan and worked with a Palestinian-Jewish cooperative in Haifa after graduation from college. Neither one of us is religious. Neither one of us has any political interest in the outcome of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — other than wanting it to end.
The sight of thousands and thousands of semi-trucks parked alongside the highway for nearly 30 miles was truly something to behold — convoys of lifesaving aid turned into static walls of a tunnel directing us toward Gaza. Travel through the Sinai is slowed by the half dozen Egyptian military checkpoints in the peninsula; after 12 hours we finally arrived in the middle of the afternoon.
The Rafah Crossing functions like a rural American airport: one baggage scanner, odd procedures and minimal facilities. Scanning the medical and humanitarian supplies from the dozens of aid teams one bag at a time was inefficiency defined. But it was the only reliable way to bring anything into Gaza.
As Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon noted on the Senate floor, the process for clearing aid with the Israeli authorities is opaque and inconsistent. “Items that are allowed in one day can be rejected the next….” For this reason, everyone simply brought whatever they could as personal luggage — even surgical equipment — paying exorbitant airline baggage fees instead of bulk shipping rates. Now that Rafah is closed, even this route for resupplying Gaza’s hospitals has been cut off. (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has shown no signs of backing off, is scheduled to address the U.S. Congress on Monday. He will also meet with Vice President Kamala Harris.)
Finally, after 10 p.m., we were off to face Salah al-Din Road, Gaza’s famous “road of death.”
Salah al-Din Road is the main north-south highway of the Gaza Strip. To cross it requires relying on a remarkably ineffective process called “deconfliction.” The fact that “deconfliction” is so unreliable explains why “Gaza is the most dangerous place in the world to be an aid worker,” according to the International Rescue Committee. It works something like this: COGAT — the office of Israel’s Defense Ministry that coordinates between the Israeli armed forces and humanitarian organizations — agrees it will not attack traffic on a specific route for a specified period.
This coordination is done through — what else? — a smartphone app. When the road turns green on the app you have 15 minutes to get on and off the specified route, and you can only request deconfliction of a particular route every three hours. After a 40-minute wait, we got the go-ahead and our drivers floored it, dodging foot and donkey traffic all along the road.
Just before midnight, we finally arrived at our destination — Gaza European Hospital — where we were greeted by a sea of children, all shorter and thinner than they ought to have been. Even over their screams of joy at meeting new foreigners, we could hear Israeli drones humming overhead. We headed to our living quarters — half of our team slept in one room in the adjacent Palestine College of Nursing, while the other half slept in one of the hospital’s outlying patient-care areas — and spent our first night sleeping under continuous, room-shaking bombardment.
For our entire time there, we lived in constant fear that Israel would invade the hospital. Thankfully we never saw a single combatant, Israeli or Palestinian.
By the time we arrived, 59 percent of all the hospital beds in Gaza had been destroyed, while the remaining partially functioning hospitals operated at 359 percent of their actual bed capacity. The World Health Organization describes them as “partially operational.”
European Hospital is located at the southeastern edge of Khan Younis; it’s normally one of three hospitals providing elective general, orthopedic, neurosurgical and cardiac surgical services to a city of 419,000 people in southern Gaza. Now it functions as the only trauma center for well over 1.5 million people, an impossible task even under the best of circumstances. It is likely the safest and best-resourced city block in the entire Gaza Strip — and yet its horrors defy description.
We first noticed the overcrowding: 1,500 people were admitted to a 220-bed hospital. Rooms meant to hold four patients typically had 10 to 12, and patients were housed in every possible space: the radiology department, the common areas, everywhere. Next, we noticed the 15,000 people sheltering on the hospital grounds and inside the hospital — lining and even blocking the hallways, throughout the wards, in the bathrooms and closets, on the stairs, even in the sterile processing and food preparation facilities and the operating rooms themselves. The hospital itself was a displaced persons camp.
Then there were the odors: The intensive care units smelled like rot and death; the corridors stank like a kitchen filled with filth; the hospital grounds smelled of sewage and spent explosives. Only the operating rooms were relatively clean.
It’s what we imagine the first weeks of a zombie apocalypse would look — and smell — like.
While touring the hospital we walked through one of the ICUs and found multiple preteens admitted with gunshot wounds to the head. One might argue that a child could have been injured unintentionally in an explosion, or perhaps even forgotten when Israel invaded a children’s hospital and reportedly left infants to die in a pediatric intensive care unit.
Gunshot wounds to the head are an entirely different matter.
We started seeing a series of children, preteens mostly, who’d been shot in the head. They’d go on to slowly die, only to be replaced by new victims who’d also been shot in the head, and who would also go on to slowly die. Their families told us one of two stories: the children were playing inside when they were shot by Israeli forces, or they were playing in the street when they were shot by Israeli forces.
(The Israel Defense Forces did not respond to specific questions for this story, but in an emailed statement, it said, “The IDF is committed to mitigating civilian harm during operational activity. In that spirit, the IDF makes great efforts to estimate and consider potential civilian collateral damage in its strikes.”)
As we met Palestinian physicians and nurses working at the hospital, it was clear that they, like their patients, were physically and mentally unwell. Giving anyone a pat on the back dropped your hand between two unpadded shoulder blades and onto an exposed spine. In any given room one found staff members with jaundiced eyes, a sure sign of acute hepatitis A infection in such overcrowded conditions.
Many staff had no sense of urgency and often no empathy, even for children. We were initially taken aback by this, But we quickly learned that our Palestinian health care colleagues were among the most traumatized people in the Strip. Like all Palestinians in Gaza, they had lost family members and their homes. Indeed, almost all of them now lived in and around the hospital with their surviving family. Although they all continued working a full schedule, they had not been paid since October 7; health sector salaries are paid by the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority and are always cut off during Israeli attacks.
Many of the staff were working at the Shifa and Indonesian Hospitals when they were destroyed. They were the lucky ones — they survived the attacks. Since October 7, at least 500 healthcare workers and 278 aid workers have been killed in Gaza. Among them was Dr. Hammam Alloh, a 36-year-old nephrologist at Shifa Hospital who refused to evacuate when Israel besieged the hospital in October.
After his home was destroyed and his family threatened, European Hospital’s director fled to Egypt, leaving an already overburdened hospital without its longtime leader. This sense of helplessness and disorientation was made worse still by the constant spread of hearsay about kidnappings, troop movements, food shipments, water availability and everything else of importance to survival and safety in a land under siege.
Cut off from the outside world and unable to access reliable information about the forces controlling whether they live or die, eat or starve, stay or run, rumors spread and amplified.
Several staff members told us they were simply waiting to die, and that they hoped Israel would get it over with sooner rather than later.
Images of Tamer from his Facebook feed that show him after he was shot and operated on (left), after he was released from Israeli custody (center) and after he was treated at Gaza European Hospital (right).
On April 2 we met Tamer. His Facebook posts show a proud young man and father who became a nurse to provide for his two small children — no small feat in a land with one of the highest unemployment rates in the world. When Israel raided Indonesian Hospital last November, he was assisting the orthopedics team in the operating room. He refused to leave his anesthetized patient. He said Israeli soldiers shot him in the leg, breaking his femur. His own orthopedic team cared for him, placing an external fixator to stabilize his shattered leg.
Next, Tamer told us, the Israelis came to his hospital room and took him, where exactly he doesn’t know. He told us he was strapped to a table for 45 days, given a juice box every day — sometimes every other day — and denied medical care for his broken femur. During that time, he told us, he was beaten so badly that his right eye was destroyed. As malnutrition set in, he developed osteomyelitis — infection of the bone itself — in his broken femur. Later, he said, he was unceremoniously dumped naked on the side of a road. With metal sticking out of his infected and broken leg and his right eye hanging out of his skull he crawled for two miles until someone found him and brought him to European Hospital.
(The IDF did not address specific questions about Tamer’s case, but instead emailed a press release responding to another outlet’s report of detainee abuse and torture at Sde Teiman. In it, the IDF denied mistreating detainees.)
When we met Tamer at the hospital for treatment, all that was left of him was the disfigured outline of a human being, his body crippled by violence, his eye surgically removed and his mind haunted by torture. A man who once healed others was reduced to constantly begging for pain medications, reliant on others for everything — and wondering if his wife and children were even alive.
Nearly all our patients arrived during mass casualty events. Khan Younis, a city in southern Gaza, had been under siege and bombardment since December. By the time we arrived on March 25 the town was inhabited by a combination of displaced persons from the north and locals who had not fled south to Rafah despite Israel’s threats against them. (Israeli forces frequently drop flyers or send texts demanding that Palestinians in Gaza leave their homes or shelters.) Extended families often concentrate themselves in as few buildings as possible. They told us they hoped that gathering in numbers would keep them safe — or at the very least, that dying together was preferable to dying separately.
We noticed that bombing seemed to peak at iftar when families were gathered together to break the fast during Ramadan with whatever food they had available.
Israa, a 26-year-old woman with a fair complexion and a quiet voice, arrived with our first mass casualty event around 4 a.m., on our second day in Gaza. In the chaos nobody could translate for us, so we were forced to improvise as she sobbed uncontrollably on a stretcher. All the ligaments in her right knee were torn; she had three open fractures in her two legs; and a massive chunk of her left thigh had been torn off. Both of her hands had second degree burns, and her face, arms and chest were stippled with shrapnel and debris. In the same incident a teenage girl came in with a lethal traumatic brain injury (she died the next morning) and a 7-year-old boy came in with a ruptured spleen (he recovered after several days).
We took Israa to the operating room. In the United States or Israel this would have been a 5-minute transition, but in the most functional hospital in Gaza it took more than one hour to get her there — working in such a severely compromised space, there was simply no way to get a trauma patient into surgery quickly. During her surgery, we realigned her broken femur, tibia and ankle in external fixators, explored an injured artery, cut chunks of dead tissue out of the massive wound in her thigh and her burned hands (a procedure known as debridement) and stopped her bleeding. It took three experienced surgeons almost four hours to do all of this. For the next 24 hours we were at her bedside almost continuously, knowing the traumatized and exhausted local staff couldn’t be expected to care for her properly.
After three days in the hospital, Israa, a mother of four, told us how she was injured: Her home was bombed without warning. She saw all her children die in front of her when the ceiling collapsed on top of them. Her relatives confirmed that her entire immediate family was buried under the rubble of their home. We didn’t have the heart to tell Israa that some of her children were probably still alive at that moment, dying unimaginably cruel deaths from dehydration and sepsis while trapped alone in a pitch-black tomb that alternates as an oven during the day and a freezer at night.
One shudders to think how many children have died this way in Gaza.
Two days later, while we waited in the preoperative area, one of the nurses pointed to a slight and clearly sick little girl. “Can you operate on her?” she asked.
“Who is she? We’ve never met her before.”
“Debridement,” the nurse said, shrugging and walking away.
That’s how we met Juri, the 9-year-old girl with the horrific injuries.
After washing away the maggots, we positioned her on her right side and got to work. We cut away four pounds of dead flesh, washing her wounds as aggressively as we could. Then we bandaged her up and booked her for another debridement the next day.
He’ll come soon, we assured her.
“You’re lying,” she told us, calmly. “He must be dead.”
As it turns out, Juri’s father wasn’t dead. We found him waiting for her in the pediatric ward of the hospital. He was a loving and gentle man who spent all day every day scouring a land in famine for anything his precious daughter would agree to eat. He told us how Juri was maimed: The family evacuated from Khan Younis to Rafah, as Israel demanded. He and his wife left their seven children with their grandparents while they desperately searched for food and water. They came back to the house bombed and destroyed, their children all severely injured or killed. Juri’s surviving siblings were at another hospital with their mother.
Over the next 10 days, in a series of operations, four surgeons put Juri back together as best we could by debriding her wounds, bringing the two ends of her femur together to close the gap in the muscles of her leg and giving her a colostomy so that feces no longer soiled her wounds. To have even a chance at a full recovery, Juri will need dozens more hours under the knife and days in a specialized pediatric ICU, which no longer exists in Gaza.
And for Juri, “full recovery” means a lifetime of severe and permanent disability.
Still, amid all this horror, there were moments of light. We took great joy seeing Juri’s personality resurface once her sepsis resolved. Instead of meekly calling for “baba” and screaming in pain when touched, she now acted like a sharp 9-year-old girl who knew she had her dad in her pocket. From then on, she refused to be sedated unless he promised her honey melon and phone calls with her siblings afterwards, famine and. disrupted cellular services be damned!
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Due to the inviolable sacred rights of property preceding moral duty in the collective West, and because we don't have a red sausage to buy legal counsel, nor can we trust that the recent ICJ verdict indicting Israel as the criminal party in the current conflict, and encouraging people to denounce and oppose its actions against Palestinians, will afford us any protection, we must stop this lengthy quote here. Please read the rest of the article on POLITICO. We hope, however, that you got the message intended by these heroic doctors. Now it's up to you to act.
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On July 2 the Israel Defense Forces ordered Gaza European Hospital and the surrounding territory to be evacuated. European Hospital is now empty, and has been looted by desperate people trying to survive.
SOURCE: POLITICO
- In cynicism and power, the US propaganda machine easily surpasses Orwells Ministry of Truth.
- Now the fight against anti-semitism is being weaponised as a new sanctimonious McCarthyism.
- Unless opposed, neither justice nor our Constitutional right to Free Speech will survive this assault.
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