‘I operated on more children in Gaza in one night than I do in the U.S. in a year’
Palestinians at the site of an Israeli airstrike at the surgical department of Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, southern Gaza, on 24 March 2025
Michal Feldon reports in +972 on 9 April 2025:
On the evening of March 23, Feroze Sidwha, a trauma and critical care surgeon who had recently arrived in Gaza from California as a volunteer medic, was on his way to the surgical ward in Nasser Hospital when an Israeli airstrike tore right through it. Israel’s army said the strike was targeted at Ismail Barhoum, a senior figure in Hamas’ political bureau who was being treated for wounds sustained in a previous airstrike only days earlier, but the bombing also killed a 16-year-old boy and wounded several more patients.
The slain teenager, named Ibrahim, was Feroze’s patient. “Ibrahim was supposed to go home today,” Feroze said when we spoke the day after the bombing. “He had some injuries to his distal colon which we repaired, but they were pretty destructive so we gave him a protective colostomy. He was recovering on the ward, and was in good shape. I never expected to have a patient killed in his hospital bed.
“If I hadn’t been pulled into the intensive care unit, I probably would’ve been killed standing next to Ibrahim,” he continued. In response to the claim that the airstrike targeted a Hamas leader, he added: “It’s one of the most cherished aspects of humanitarian law that when a person is wounded, not participating in combat, and being attended to by a doctor, they are a protected person.”
I first encountered Feroze last October, when he and almost 100 other American medical personnel sent an open letter to the president and vice president of the United States detailing what they had seen during their time volunteering at hospitals in Gaza, and calling for an end to the war and to U.S. weapons shipments to Israel. Three weeks later, I was among a group of over 100 Israeli medical personnel who signed another open letter to President Biden and Vice President Harris in solidarity with those American doctors. Since then, Feroze and I have continued our collaboration.
After returning home from his first volunteering deployment to Gaza’s European Hospital in March-April 2024, Feroze barely paused for breath. Whenever I tried to get hold of him — for a Zoom conversation or to give a lecture at the recent conference of Israeli medical personnel against the war — he was busy in Washington with some political committee or another, which he somehow manages to fit in among countless interviews, webinars, and articles. In March, he returned to Gaza for a second volunteering stint.
This time, as part of a team from MedGlobal, Feroze took up residence in the surgical department at Nasser Medical Complex in the southern city of Khan Younis. With 450-500 patient beds, Nasser is currently the largest functioning hospital in southern Gaza. The Israeli military has attacked the complex on several occasions since October 7; after a month-long siege that culminated in the arrest of 70 staff in February 2024, the hospital was declared non-functional, but has since been able to recover some of its capacities.