Dr. Feroze Sidhwa is a general, trauma, and critical care surgeon based in Stockton, California. He has volunteered in hospitals in Gaza twice—at European Hospital in Khan Yunis from March 25 through April 8, 2024, and at Nasser Hospital, one of the last functioning hospitals in all of Gaza, from March 3 through April 1, 2025. He testified before the United Nations Security Council on May 28, 2025. Sidhwa visited Madison, Wisconsin, for a series of public events in late July 2025, where this interview was conducted. It has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: When we spoke after your first visit to Gaza in 2024, you told me that you were seeing a lot of children with gunshot wounds to their heads and chests. How are things now, a year later?
Feroze Sidhwa: The first time I was in Gaza I was at European Hospital on the southeastern edge of Khan Yunis. There were ground troops there. I was there for fourteen days and I saw thirteen children, small kids, shot in the head or the chest, or at least that’s what I recorded in my journal. I’m pretty sure I saw many more that I didn’t record.
Later, I was on a panel in Dearborn, Michigan, and I sat next to Dr. Thaer Ahmad, who’s been in Gaza as well. I said to him “One of the things that was really, really shocking to me, was how many kids I saw shot in the head.” And he said, “Oh, me too. Almost every single day.” We were in different hospitals. So I started asking other people who had worked in Gaza as well. And sure enough, most of them had seen the same thing: children shot in the head and the chest.
That’s horrifying, and it can maybe help people understand what the attack on Gaza is because you can’t explain that as the fog of war.
[When I was back in the United States,] I wrote a letter to [President Joe] Biden, centered on the shooting of children. I asked other doctors and nurses who have been to Gaza to sign it, and they did. Forty-five people. Eventually, about 84 percent of [international healthcare volunteers] who worked in Gaza reported that we had regularly seen small children shot in the head or the chest.
So we have a large number of children killed. And of course, there’s a lot more that were killed in many other ways.
Q: This is an example of the state of Israel trying to make sure that there is no next generation. With so many children with gunshot wounds to their heads and chests, and so many starved, it sounds like genocide, doesn’t it?
Sidhwa: I personally don’t try to comment on whether it’s genocide or not, but since Omer Bartov and Raz Segal and Amos Goldberg and every other Holocaust and genocide scholar of any note says it is, I don’t think there’s any discussion about it anymore. Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
When I wrote about what healthcare providers had seen in Gaza for The New York Times last year, and 84 percent of us had regularly seen small children shot in the head or the chest, people started asking me, “Do you think Israel is ordering soldiers to shoot children?” I always said that there were two possibilities: Either the [soldiers] are being ordered to do it or they’re just doing it and the army [leadership] is ignoring it. But after this has gone on for months, those are the same thing. That seems like evidence of genocide. I’m probably going to get the exact words wrong, but one soldier said that “our method of communication with the Palestinians is gunfire.”
I was skeptical that the shootings of children were being ordered. But then, with the recent information about the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) massacres, it turns out that Israeli commanders are indeed ordering soldiers to kill civilians en masse. The GHF compounds are these large, heavily militarized, heavily fortified compounds that are behind Israeli lines. The Palestinians have to cross through the Israeli military line to get to the compound. And that’s by design. And this is where it seems like commanders’ orders came into play. The Israelis shoot at anybody that crosses an imaginary line that they have decided is not to be crossed, so you can’t get too close to the GHF. They just shoot people dead until people realize that that line of bodies is the line you don’t cross.
Furthermore, people are so desperately hungry that they keep trying. You can actually see how gaunt a lot of them are, but they’re going because their kids in their tent are just screaming with hunger. I have Palestinian friends who have sent me the videos of their kids, just screaming and screaming “Why can’t I eat something? Why can’t I eat something?” It’s horrifying.
Q: What does it take for a child to die of starvation?
Sidhwa: An adult can go about sixty days with literally zero caloric intake before dying. Children are much more vulnerable to starvation. It depends how old they are. A newborn, you might be talking about two or three days. Newborns have no ability to regulate their fluid balance. They’re dying of dehydration, basically.
I did talk to another person who had seen this regularly [in Gaza] even back in 2024. A pediatric nurse practitioner named Asma Taha, who signed the letter to Biden, wrote to me that she saw newborns die of malnutrition and dehydration every day—literally. Every day, a newborn who was born a week or two or three weeks before, would come back to the hospital dead because their mom had been trying to breastfeed and couldn’t, because she was also malnourished and dehydrated.
I can’t think of a worse psychological torment for these mothers. They have to breastfeed because there’s no formula. And even if there was, there’s no clean water in Gaza to mix formula, so they have to breastfeed. But they are severely malnourished. And furthermore, they just went through a pregnancy. The men are mostly giving food to women and children, but this mother now has to decide, “How much of this extremely limited food do I eat [so that I can have milk] for the newborn, how much do I give to my other children so they don’t die?” This is a constant source of psychological torment for parents but specifically mothers in Gaza. They’re not going to be able to live with themselves after making these kinds of choices, no matter what choice they make, because there’s no good answer.
At age five, you can tolerate starvation more like an adult but below age five you’re much more vulnerable. Starvation affects not just physical development. Even if these children survive, they are going to be severely impacted by this. This means literally every child in Gaza. We’re not talking about only the ones who are on the cusp of starvation death. The brain doesn’t lay down proteins and fats properly, so it doesn’t develop properly and the child doesn’t develop normal intelligence. [The child] will be stunted in its growth, meaning they just won’t reach the normal height and weight. Plenty of other organ failure problems can come with it. That’s why when people reach a certain point in starvation, you can’t just give them food anymore.
[Perhaps] you’ve heard that there’s something called refeeding syndrome that people can die of, but there are other types of organ failure as well. Their liver or kidneys have failed, they don’t have a way of processing food anymore. Their digestive tract doesn’t work normally, so they need specialized feeding and they might need a tube placed down their nose to just feed them small amounts at a time while they get [intravenous] nutrition and hydration. Now, of course, none of this is available in Gaza. There’s no clean water, no hygiene—basically [none of] the things that a person needs to be nutritionally replete.
Q: What do people drink in Gaza?
Sidhwa: The Rand Corporation wrote a good analysis of Gaza’s water system in 2018. Most of Gaza has relied on the delivery of water of highly variable quality to their homes by trucks. But since October 7, 2023, almost every desalination plant in Gaza has been destroyed. The entire water distribution system is completely gone. People are reviving old techniques for getting out water that is held below the sand surface and things like that. This is actually something that has happened frequently in starvation zones, because they are often zones of deprivation of water as well.
But that’s obviously not enough to sustain a society that was built on a modern water infrastructure. The Gaza aquifer was completely destroyed by the Israeli settlement project there. The United Nations reported on it after the Israeli settlers got out of Gaza.
When I was at European Hospital, there were 10,000 people sheltering on the grounds of the hospital. They shared four toilets and one water spigot, and I wanted to know what comes out of that spigot. The Palestinians were saying “No, no, doctor, that water is not for you.” Literally, as I brought the cup to my face, my eyes started to burn. It was incredibly salty and brackish. I had a hard time just swallowing the small sip that I took. It was unbelievably vile. That’s what [has been] available to most people in Gaza since July or August last year.
UNRWA [The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East] and other organizations had water distribution sites in Gaza [before Israel banned them from the region]. I saw plenty of kids hauling water away. It wasn’t perfect, but at least there was water. Oxfam put out a report in July 2024 called “Water War Crimes: How Israel has weaponised water in its military campaign in Gaza.” It points out that there were at that time half a million people in the Mawasi area [in Gaza], sharing 120 toilets and getting just 2.5 liters [approximately 0.66 gallons] of water per person per day, and that’s for drinking, cooking, washing, everything that people need relatively clean water for. [According to the World Health Organization, a minimum of fifteen liters per person per day should be distributed in a humanitarian emergency. In normal times it’s 100 liters.] Eventually, there were probably 1.5 million people in Mawasi so, at that point, everyone was getting, like, one liter of water per person per day.
When I was at European Hospital, during the ground invasion, there was often a severe shortage of water, so then they would shunt the water to the intensive care unit and the operating room, and so we’d be in the emergency room dealing with mass casualty events— you’d literally be in the middle of washing the blood off your hands—then the water just stops.
Gaza is the thirstiest place in the world by a wide margin. And besides, this kind of water makes you sick. Every child I’ve ever encountered in Gaza had diarrhea. Virtually every single one. Almost all of them have a productive cough. And there’s polio. Polio resurfaced in Gaza because the kids aren’t vaccinated and the burden of the virus was massive, and the sewers are just overflowing. When I was at European Hospital, besides the 10,000 people sheltering there, there were 1,500 people inside the hospital. The sewage system of the hospital is not meant to accommodate that.
So, the radiology department would literally flood with sewage almost every day, and [hospital staff and volunteers] had to sweep it out. People were sleeping on the ground in shit. The smell was just overwhelming. It was the stench of dead tissue, of death, but also of uncleanliness and body odor.
If there is a large explosion nearby, its dust settles on the courtyard. It’s in your eyes. It’s in your ears. We Westerners are overwhelmed by it but the kids are just going on playing, like nothing happened. No one else even notices. You really feel like the world is ending when you’re there.
And this is something we are doing, we have to remember that. We [in the United States] are the ones funding it. Without our support it wouldn’t be happening. All we have to do is stop sending Israel the bombs they’re using to destroy Gaza and her children.
To hear another conversation with Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, you can listen to Esty Dinur’s interview with him on WORT Community Radio in Madison, Wisconsin on July 18, 2025.