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The Chris Hedges Report
Israel’s Eradication of Gaza’s Healthcare System (w/ Dr. Feroze Sidhwa) | The Chris Hedges Report
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- [00:10]
Chris Hedges
Israel, during the genocide, has repeatedly targeted Gaza's 36 hospitals, clinics, ambulances, and killed over 1,000 medical workers, including over 400 doctors and nurses, many in targeted assassinations. 22 of Gaza's hospitals are now only partially functioning, chronically short of medicine and basic supplies caused by Israel's total blockade imposed on March 2 of all humanitarian supplies, including food. The latest medical facility to be bombed by Israel is the Al Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City. The largest remaining functioning hospital in northern Gaza. El Ahli Hospital was treating hundreds of patients when Israel, on short notice, ordered its evacuation. Patients, many critically ill, were carted out to the road. The hospital was then hit by at least two missiles. In October 2023, nearly 500 people were killed in an Israeli air attack on the Al Ahli Hospital. Israel routinely blames errant rockets launched by armed Palestinian factions for the explosions or claims hospitals are being used as command and control centers by Hamas and are therefore legitimate targets. This last claim was made by Israel to justify the most recent missile strike. But Israel rarely offers evidence to back up its allegations. Today we discuss Israel's systematic destruction of Gaza's health infrastructure with Dr. Firouz Sidwa, a general trauma and critical care surgeon in California who recently returned from Gaza. This is your second trip to work in Gaza. Before we begin with what's happening in Gaza, you should talk about all the roadblocks that are put before medical workers who want to go volunteer to work in the hospitals in Gaza.
- [02:15]
Dr. Firouz Sidwa
Yeah, so the first time I went was March of 2024. And at that time the, the Rafa crossing hadn't been taken the border between Gaza and Egypt. And so the Egyptians didn't care if you took in a whole bunch of extra supplies because they knew that the hospitals were being starved. There's no regular resupply of the hospitals for surgical equipment, for antibiotics, even. Just simple things, things that couldn't possibly be weaponized. And so, you know, I took, if I'm remembering correctly, it was, it was a year ago now, but if I'm remembering right, I took about 850, 50 pounds of stuff with me on my British Airways flight. I gave another £250 to another guy who was going from just, he just lives north of me. And so I alone brought like 1100 pounds of stuff, all medical stuff. No, nothing, nothing really. Nothing else. By the time we left Gaza in two weeks, it was, it was really all gone. I went with Mark Perlmutter, who took about 700 pounds of orthopedic implants. So, yeah, so that, that was a crucial way for, for physicians, nurses, others to bring things in that are, that are needed because the hospitals just can't get resupplied. Obviously it's not enough like individual people can't bring in enough medical equipment for a whole society. One, one, one person at a time. But, but it was something. Now you know, I think if I'm remembering right, Rafa was taken on May 7 and now you now the way medical teams, what these are called are EMTs, emergency medical teams and a World Health Organization mechanism. And so the WHO talks to Kogat, the Israeli office that coordinates with humanitarian groups for the idf. And you. Everybody gets. So, so the, the WHO puts together a team. So for me it was six people to or five, five healthcare workers. And, and they, and then everybody gets pre approval from the Israelis. So you get pre approved. Oh great. I, I got pre approval. So you fly to Amman, the capital of Jordan. You wait, you have to get there two or three days early. So now you've already taken more than four weeks off of work, which is very difficult for an American physician to do. I'm very lucky in that I have supportive partners who help me do that. But you've taken four or five weeks off of work, you fly to Amman and like literally less than 12 hours before you're gonna cross the border, you get final approval. Now in my group, just to illustrate how ridiculous this is, in my group, I, you know, I'm a 43 year old guy, so I'm certainly a man of military age and I've been perfectly public about what I saw in Gaza, what I did there, what other people have seen. I've written a New York Times article, I've written a Politico article. So I've been like fairly public. I, I was admitted. Tammy Abu Ghanayam, who was with me, is probably the next most vocal person on the trip and she was admitted. The people who were denied are a 78 year old pediatrician with two fake knees named John Kaylor, who obviously couldn't possibly pose a threat to anybody. And then an American army veteran and woman who probably weighs about 105 pounds named Bing. Like, how could you. What, what is the logic? What's the reason behind it? It's, it's just, it's, it, it seems to be quite literally at random. So you know, our team didn't have half of the people that we were, that we were expecting to have. The hospital didn't have half of the extra staff help that it was expecting to have. And it's it's a, you know, it's, it's not as big of a problem as bombs falling out of the sky, but it's, it's just, it's clearly just disruption for its own sake.
- [05:54]
Chris Hedges
So let's talk about your first trip and your second trip and comparing the two of them and talk about, you know, where you were located, what you did, what your day was like. But I'm assuming this second time it must have been even more horrendous than the first time in terms of shortages and power outages and everything else.
- [06:16]
Dr. Firouz Sidwa
Yeah. So the first trip was March 25th to April 8th if I'm remembering the dates correctly. Just, just two weeks. And when we, we were, and I was in Khan Yunus on, at European Hospital, which is on the eastern edge of the, of the city, pretty close to the, the border zone or the border with Israel. So when we got there the, at the time, basically all of Gaza's hospitals were also refugee camps or displaced persons camps, however you want to say it. And the, so the, not only was the grounds of the hospital like the camp, the hospital campus was a, was a refugee camp. But even inside the hospital, in the hallways, lining every hallway, lining every area that was available were families living in improvised tents. You know, just some string hanging, hanging a sheet on the, from the ceiling so that people could have a little bit of privacy. And so there were about 1500 people living inside the hospital, not patients just living inside the hospital. And then on top of that it's a 220 bed facility that had 1,500 people admitted to it. So you can imagine in, in this situation, it's not really a hospital anymore. Anymore. There's kind of hospital stuff going on, but it's not really a hospital. It's impossible to keep anything clean. You know, women were like draining out canned foods in the ICU sink. It was just, yeah, it was, it was completely ridiculous. Furthermore, the entire healthcare staff was already either homeless or you know, the ground invasion and the, the real destruction of Khan Yunus was happening at that time. So it was impo. It was very unsafe to move from, especially because European hospitals on the far eastern edge of the city, near the, near the border, it's very dangerous for people to come and from the hospital. So most of the healthcare staff actually lived to the hospital as well. The OR staff slept in the operating room at night or, or in the sterile processing facilities, you know, is just completely ridiculous. So the hospital, truth be told, it really just couldn't function like this. And we, you know, we were able to do some good work, but not, not much, to be perfectly honest. You know, there's. When I, when I first got there, I did wound care rounds, which took about three days to find. Everybody in, in the hospital who had a serious wound, half of them were small kids. The, what were the.
- [08:38]
Chris Hedges
Describe the wounds.
- [08:40]
Dr. Firouz Sidwa
Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. So the, the wounds were of different varieties. Some of them were surgical wounds, meaning, like they had had a laparotomy. Somebody, the general surgeon had looked inside their abdomen, and then the wound had become infected afterwards, which virtually every wound did. So the skin had to be opened and allowed. The pus had to be allowed to drain out. But then that requires constant wound care going forward. That was probably, I don't know, a third, I'm just guessing, but about a third of them. And the other two thirds were really serious injuries to the limbs. Part amputations, partial amputations, severe degloving injuries, like where, you know, the, the part of a limb is kind of banana peeled off, things like that. And so I found about 250 people, like I said, half of them small kids, who needed not just wound care, but actually operative wound care. Like they needed to be taken to an operating room with all the bells and whistles that we have there, nice lighting, anesthetics, things like that. Well, there's only four operating rooms at European hospital. How am I going to take 250 people to the OR every day? Just, just me. Like, this is completely ridiculous, right? So the, so what we had to do was actually start taking ketamine. It's a, it's an anesthetic that lets you keep breathing. And we had to start, we had to take that. And I just brought, I brought a little pulse oximeter, the little thing that tells you how high your oxygen is that I bought off of Amazon. And that was the only monitoring I had. I would just bring the ketamine out to the regular ward, and I would anesthetize people on the ward. This is, you know, I, I, I use ketamine in the United States for my patients. So it's not like I was doing something I've never done before. But this is not the way you, you do these things properly. There's no sterility. And even, even, even in the operating room, to be honest, there wasn't much sterility, but the ward was obviously much worse. You know, there's cats walking around. There's just like, there's no, there's no, there's no sterility we little kids are running in and out of the room while we're doing this stuff, you know, and every room has three or four times as many people in it as it's supposed to, you know, because like I said, 220 bed facility, but with 1500 people admitted to it. So, so it was basically just impossible. You can imagine the, the hospital just can't function like this. So almost every, actually, I think quite literally, I might be, there might be one or two exceptions, but I think literally every hospital in Gaza has at some point been forcibly evacuated, meaning everyone was told, leave or we'll kill you if you don't leave. Which is, you know, evacuation isn't really the right term for that, but. And when once, once they were evac, once they were, once people were forcibly displaced from the hospital, the hospital administrators usually made the decision not to allow refugees to come back into the hospital itself. The, the grounds of the hospital are right outside it. That was fine. But they, they said, look, the hospitals just can't function like this. So then when I went back to, to Nasser this time when I was there, March, I GUESS it was 6 to April 1, the, thankfully, the hospital was not a DP camp anymore and so the hospital could actually function. But you know, I got there on March 6th and the, like you said, the blockade had been, or the cutoff of all entry and exit into Gaza of any goods whatsoever had started on March 2. So a few days before. So the hospital can no longer be resupplied with anything. Well, from March 6th, when I was there until the 18th, there were, you know, we did see trauma cases, maybe one or two surgical cases a day due to trauma, but otherwise the hospital was actually working in its normal elective capacity, fixing hernias, taking out people's gallbladders, things like that. The normal, normal general surgical problems that any of us can, can get at any moment. Well, so we weren't burning through our supplies, in other words. But on March 18, that's when the bombing campaign restarted. Just that day. Literally just that day, that morning. I know because I'm writing a paper about this for a medical journal. Nasser Medical Complex just by itself saw 221 patients just that morning. Just to give you an idea of how extreme that is, I was a resident during the Boston Marathon bombing. It was a, an explosion, a terrorist attack in 2013 in, in Boston during the Marathon. And in that, in that attack, it was, it was in the city of Boston. Boston has six level one trauma centers, if you include Boston Children's Hospital because it's a pediatric level one trauma center. And between them they have 4, 000 beds. Right. NASSER MEDICAL Complex with the tent extensions that it has, has 450 beds, so about about a tenth in all of Boston. All of the level one trauma centers together saw 129 patients that day. Nasser alone saw 221 patients. The differential is just enormous. So you're talking about a huge expenditure of hospital resources and the hospital not only can't be resupplied anymore, but the hospital's warehouse was actually destroyed during the raid on, on Nasser, which had been a year before I got there was actually when I was at European Hospital. They were raiding Nasser Medical complex about a year ago.
- [13:45]
Chris Hedges
How was, how was it, how was it destroyed for us?
- [13:47]
Dr. Firouz Sidwa
Yeah, so, so the, so the, the hospital has a relatively new building. I think it was built in 2020. It was a dialysis unit on the first and second floors. And then the hospital's warehouse was the third floor. The Israelis invade. When the Israelis invaded and basically smashed Nasser Hospital to pieces, they went into that building, they found that it was a dialysis center. And then they just burned the whole place. They just set the whole place on fire. You can still see actually the burn marks on the outside of the, of, you know, where the.
- [14:15]
Chris Hedges
And when was that? Was that early in the genocide or when was it?
- [14:19]
Dr. Firouz Sidwa
That was in March of 2024. Yeah, it was. So the Israelis raided Nasser Medical Complex in February of 2024 and then again in March of 2024, February. They certainly caused damage and a whole lot of disruption. And I think about half a dozen patients died during that time. And they arrested a whole bunch of people. But then they came back in March and that's when they really, really destroyed the place. Tore it to shreds, arrested most of the medical staff, buried people in mass graves outside the hospital, burned the warehouse force. The, the, the hospital director, I think his name was Dr. Atef if I remember correctly. Or he's, he's still there now, forced him to make a confession in sitting in front of Israeli flags in his office. I mean, just completely ridiculous nonsense.
- [15:14]
Chris Hedges
Was that mass grave, which I remember reading about, were those mostly patients who had died?
- [15:21]
Dr. Firouz Sidwa
I honestly don't know the answer. So, so there were. This is, this is sad. There were two mass graves at Nasser Medical Complex from what I've been told. I haven't read a report about this, but from what I've been told then it makes some sense. The masquerade. So we, we lived on the fourth floor of the hospital. And this was so to the west, on the western edge of the hospital grounds, right at the. There was a large courtyard that had been a tent encampment. The Israelis came through. This is a year ago now, right in March of last year, the Israelis came through the tent, through the wall, destroyed the entire tent encampment, and of course threw everybody out. They then dug a mass grave in that area just inside the wall of the hospital. And from what I'm told, again, I can't verify, but from what I'm told, this was, this was filled with bodies, mostly from Khan Yunus, actually. Why? I don't know. I don't know if they had been dug up and the Israelis were looking for hostages or if it was just random brutality for its own sake. I really have no idea. But then, so that's looking west. That's on the western edge. On the southern edge of the hospital compound is a small mosque which is right next to a, right next to the morgue. And the morgue started burying people in, in a mass grave right where the mosque is. Now that mosque wasn't there. It's just a tent. They started pairing people in a very shallow mass grave there because the Israelis wouldn't allow them to take bodies to the graveyard, which is about 300 meters away from the hospital. So they were burying people there, but they don't, you know, they didn't have any equipment. There's. They're, you know, they certainly weren't allowed to dig real graves. So all of these bodies were mangled by, by animals and things like that. And then after, after the Israelis finally withdrew from the hospital, those people were, were exhumed and then were buried properly in a, in a grave elsewhere.
- [17:20]
Chris Hedges
I want to go back to. So the Bombing starts on March 18th. You have that day.
- [17:25]
Dr. Firouz Sidwa
You have.
- [17:25]
Chris Hedges
Right. 200, over 200, 221 patients. What it looked like. Describe what you saw.
- [17:33]
Dr. Firouz Sidwa
Yeah, so this, this, like I mentioned, I was, I was at the Boston Marathon bombing or I was, I was working in a hospital during the Boston Marathon bombing at Boston Medical center. And that until. Up until March 18, that was the biggest mass casualty event I had ever seen. But March 18th was a completely different. It wasn't even the same. It seems strange to call both of them mass casualty events. So. Yeah, so, you know, the, the, we were all, the, the Bombing started at 2:30am we were all asleep in the, the fourth floor hospital living quarters, uh, where the, where the emergency medical team stay. And so The. When the some, some blast happened, close enough that it actually blew the door of our living quarters open, it smashed into the cabinet right behind it. And that was what woke us all up. It was incredibly loud. And then we realized that the bombing had restarted because it was just. It was just continuous at that point. The whole hospital was shaking. It was incredibly loud. It was like I was back at European Hospital. And so we all said, well, you know, we better, better go down to the emergency room. So we all got dressed, went down to the ER and we went to the front of the hospital. And I have to say the palace, that when I was at European Hospital, they did not have the ability to triage, to run a mass casualty event properly. Nasser was very different. The, The Palestinians are they. They really are very good at this. I was, I was pretty shocked by how efficient they were. And just to give you an idea, the. When we, when we've got down there, patients hadn't started arriving yet. And the. Already at the front of the hospital. This is like seven or eight minutes after the bombing started. Already at the front of the hospital. The direct. They're not the director of nursing, the nursing supervisor on call. And Khalid Al Ser, who is one of the. You probably have at least heard his name. He's a. He's a general surgeon at Nasser Medical Complex. He's quite well known because he was. He was imprisoned by the Israelis for six months. And so Khaled was at the front. Now, Khalid is 10 years younger than I am. He's. He finished residency two years ago. And residency in the Gaza Strip is not a very robust experience compared to say, like the United States, where it's. It's much, uh, much more structured. Uh, nevertheless, he is out there and he's the one that's going to lead this mass casualty event. And he does so incredibly effectively people who are obviously dead, even though their families, you know, decapitated, chest is ripped open, whatever it might be, their families are obviously begging you, no, no, take them and do something just like, no, take them to the morgue. They're dead. Keep driving the. Because otherwise the hospital is flooded with dead people and completely uninteresting people who have like, a finger injury, you know, then. Then you just don't have any space to take care of the people who are seriously injured. So then, so then he started directing patients into green, yellow and red, red zones. The red zone is where me and Dr. Morgan McMonagle, he's an Irish trauma surgeon that was there with us. He was with medical Aid for Palestinians. I was with Med Global. They he college said look, you guys go to the red area and start taking patients up to the OR as you, as you think they need to go. So, so Morgan and I went to the, went to the red area and honestly the first 10 or 15 minutes all we did was pronounce small children dead. Most of the people in that area were small kids. They're laid out on. There were six or seven stretchers in there. I can't remember, I think, I think six. But there's already children laid out all over the floor. So like the first, the first person I found was this maybe probably a three or four year old girl. She had her, how her head was still attached to her, I really don't know. She just had an incredible number of shrapnel injuries to the head and also some to the neck and the, she wasn't breathing properly. So I jaw thrusted her just meaning like kind of bringing your, your, anybody who's done, you know, CPR classes learned how to do that and, but she still didn't start breathing properly. And in a mass casualty event, especially when we don't have a neurosurgeon, that basically means she's going to die. She was still attempting to breathe but she, she couldn't. So, and it was, it was because of these brain injuries she had. So I, I just, I picked her up, I gave her to, I assume it was her father, it was some male relative. I gave him to her and I said take her out there. There's an area they literally, they do this in every hospital in Gaza now They, they have to set up an area where patients can just die with their families because they can't be helped. You know, their, their injuries are either too severe for what the hospital can actually provide or, or they're just, or, or it's just they're, they're so far gone that it would take, you know, 10 people all day to possibly save their life, maybe have a 5 or 10 chance of saving their life. But that means those 10 people aren't working on everybody else who have a 90 chance of survival. You know, so these are, they're called triage decisions and these are, you know, they're not, not the most fun things, especially when you're dealing with small kids. But so then I, I think there was one other girl that I pronounced dead in the same fashion and then finally I found a little five year old girl. I thought she was four at the time and she turned out to be five who had a single wound right here on the left side of her face. It turned out that that shrapnel had traveled through her brain, but it had stayed on one side. So that's actually a survivable injury. And other than that, her spleen was bleeding and her left lung was punctured and was bleeding. So I took her upstairs, I took her to the operating room, removed her spleen, put it in a chest tube. One of the pediatric surgeons actually came in in the middle of the operation, so I handed it off to him and went across. You know, there's a bank of six operating rooms, so I just went across and there was a 29 year old woman there named Lobna that one of the residents Yahya had brought up to, to operate on. Lobna had a hole in her back about maybe a little bit smaller than a bowling ball, just above her gluteal cleft, above her butt crack. And I don't know what had caused, I've never, I saw two such injuries in Gaza. One was one of the last people I operated on before I left. But I've never seen an injury like that. This injury, you know, your, your pelvis has two wings and the bone right in the middle is called the, the sacrum. It's a very, very dense bone. It attaches your spine to your pelvis. It's very, very thick and dense. It was completely gone and there's a fine network of veins that sits right on top of it that were just shredded. I mean, they were just bleeding everywhere. And there's nothing surgically that you can do about this. Her vagina was torn, her rectum was torn, her bladder was torn. And so we, we just basically closed off the rectum because it's dirty and we left everything else alone and we packed her tightly with cotton, with, with gauze and we took her to the icu. Now in the US or in Israel or in Britain or actually really any, any third world country, even that, where, where it wasn't true that every single hospital was also experiencing a mass casualty event at the same time she, this, this woman would have lived because all she needed was to be transfused with blood for two or three days until those veins stopped bleeding. Whether or not the big wound in her back could be reconstructed with flaps and things, I honestly don't know. Probably not in the, not in the context of Gaza, elsewhere it certainly could be, but, but, but because we were in this huge mass casualty event and because there was no way of the hospital getting blood from Elsewhere, you know, like at Boston Med center when we, during the marathon bombing, if we had started to run out of blood, we just would have called, we would have called, you know, hospitals in Lowell or in Brookline or like literally just anywhere else and they would have just truck, they would just put a whole bunch of blood in an ambulance and driven it to us. That's obviously not an option because every hospital in Gaza is having a mass casualty event at the same moment. So the blood bank just said, look, she can only get eight units, that's it. But she would have needed like 100. So she died, she bled to death 12 hours later. The next kid that we operated on, me and Morgan and, and one of the Palestinian surgeons as well was a six year old boy who had two shrapnel injuries to the right side of his heart. His heart actually stopped on the way up to the, up to the operating room. Morgan opened his chest, actually was able to sew the holes closed and get his heart restarted. Just because the kid's so young, he's just physiologically robust, you know, his liver was smashed. His right lung, if I'm remembering correctly, had a huge gash in it that we resected with just, just removed that part of the lung basically his liver was torn and his stomach, small bowel and colon were all, all had major holes in them. And again, this kid in the flagship hospital, because you remember Nasser is the biggest hospital in Gaza right now. Shifa, I know you've been to, I'm pretty sure you've been to Shifa Hospital many times. But yeah, Shifa doesn't really exist for, in any real sense right now. I think there's one operating room that's been set up in a dentist's office or something. It's completely absurd. So right now Nasser is the biggest hospital in the flagship hospital of any third world country. This kid could have survived. But at Nasser we don't have the right types of pressers, right types of critical care medications and, and even just simple things like a pediatric ventilator, we just wasn't available. So he died 12 hours later. The the end, this, it just, it kind of went on like this. The one of the last cases I did on that day was a 16 year old boy named Ibrahim. He wasn't bleeding badly, but he had injuries to his, his rectum and his colon. So and as his belly pain got worse, we said let's take him to the operating room. So we did opened his abdomen and found those injuries, repaired them and I gave him A colostomy. And he's, he's the, he's the boy that was killed on, on March 23rd when the Israelis bombed Nasser to, to kill some guy named Ismail Bar, whom that they don't like. And, and yeah, so, so, you know, basically the last operation I did on March 18, that kid, he would have gone home on March 24, but then he was murdered in his hospital bed on March 23rd.
- [27:46]
Chris Hedges
Is that because they bombed the house, they bombed the hospital?
- [27:49]
Dr. Firouz Sidwa
Yeah. On March 23rd, Nasser was bombed directly. The Israelis were quite proud of it. They didn't, there was no, no attempt to pretend otherwise. And yeah, so on it was March 23rd, it was, I think about 9, 8, 30 or 9 o'clock at night. And the, so I actually I was, like I said, we lived on the fourth floor of the hospital in the EMT area. And the men's surgical ward, they divide all the wards between men and women. The men's surgical ward was on the second floor, but the ICU is also on the fourth floor and I have to walk past it to go down there. So after Iftar, you know, the, the evening, the evening meal that, that Muslims have during Ramadan. After iftar, I was gonna go change Ibrahim's bandages and just, and just explain to his family more because, you know, he has a colostomy, but he's a 16 year old kid and so just explaining how to take care of it. He was actually a pretty, pretty smart kid. He didn't, didn't complain about things and he was already changing his own colostomy appliance. But, but just to explain to them what's going on, what do you do from here, how does he get better moving forward, things like that. And, and as I walked past the icu, there was a, a critical care doctor, a Palestinian critical care doctor. I think her name is Hanib. But she was like froze. There's this guy over here, Muhammad, he was bleeding. He, he was just transferred from another hospital. Can you come take a look at him? Yeah, sure. So I went in there, spent about 10 minutes working up Muhammad and we, we realized he needed to go to the or. So I said, okay, you'll, I told her like, you go talk to the anesthesia folks and tell him he needs to go to the OR right away. I'm just going to go change this kid's dressings because who knows how long this operation will take. He'll be asleep by the time I get out. So we're going to change, I'm going to go Change his dressings. And then by the time I do that, I'll come back and we'll be in the operating room with Muhammad. And literally as I walked out of the icu, that's when Muhammad or that's when Ibrahim's room exploded. The, the Israelis, I don't know, I don't think they confirmed what they used, but it was probably a drone fired missile. The Palestinian, the Palestinian guys who cleaned up the, the ward afterwards found, found the munitions remnants and it had a camera on it and stuff. So it's probably, probably a drone fired missile. But, but yeah, you know, Ibrahim and this, the guy that they were trying to kill, Ismail, are from the same family. They're like distant cousins or something. So the, so they were put in the same room because that just makes family visits easier and things like that. And, and yeah, so this, so this kid was killed in this hospital bed. I was almost killed because I was literally on my way down to be standing right next to him.
- [30:25]
Chris Hedges
But yeah, I want to talk about sniper fire. You know, there's all sorts of reports of children being hit and of course you may not have seen it, but you know that people, snipers shooting children in the head, etc. What can you tell me about Israeli sniper fire?
- [30:45]
Dr. Firouz Sidwa
Yeah, so I try to be careful about this. I don't. So like you said, I wouldn't have seen the shooting. Right. Because I'm sitting in the hospital waiting for, for people to come in. So, so let's talk about my first trip there. European hospital in March and April of last year. And during that time there were ground troops in Khan Eunice. And that's where the, that's where the hospital is located. And, and literally, quite literally every day I was There, I did 13 days of clinical work there and I saw 13 children shot in the head during that time. I wrote about this in the New York Times and I pulled, I pulled about 64 other physicians and nurses who'd been in Gaza as well about what they had seen. And pretty much everybody saw the same thing because we were there during the ground while the ground invasion was active. And, and yeah, most of us saw some. And we're not talking about 17 and a half year old boys, we're talking about small, like preteen children shot in the head or the chest, often with single gunshot wounds to the head and head and the chest. And, and this was a major, this, this was constant. I mean, you know, I, I actually, I, I try to be as conservative as possible with these things. So I, I actually only talk about the children that I actually recorded in my diary. When I was there. I, There were, There were entire days where like, literally I had one pair of gloves available. Like, they're. We were out of gloves or there were no gloves, so my hands were just like, covered in blood the entire day. So I couldn't even grab my phone to write anything down, you know, so I'm sure I actually saw more. I just, I just don't remember. So, you know, that. That was, it was a huge problem. And the reason, the reason that I focused on that in the, in the Times, and then, you know, when I give talks about this and stuff like that, the reason I focused on that is because it, it, it kind of illustrates what the Israeli attack is, you know, like, because it's always framed as a, as a, an Israel Hamas war. Right? Like, like Mark Perlmutter and I, when we got back, we wrote an article in Politico. And the whole point of this article is to discuss how direct and how, how, how clearly directed this attack is at the civilian population of Gaza. Now we don't, we don't explicitly discuss like that, we don't explicitly say that. We just show that, give people the stories and we hope that they can come to their own conclusion. But, you know, you've. You used to write for the Times, right? So the, you know how newspapers work, you don't really choose the headline of your article that's decided on by editors. You really just don't even have anything to do with that question.
- [33:20]
Chris Hedges
I'm often surprised and you're often unpleasantly surprised.
- [33:24]
Dr. Firouz Sidwa
Yeah. And that's exactly what happened here is. And I just have to give my, my editor, the, the editor that we worked with for the piece, Teresa, all the credit in the world. I'm sure she didn't choose this headline. She was absolutely phenomenal. But whoever chose this headline made the sub, or I don't know what you call the, the smaller headline right below the headline, but it was what two surgeons saw in the Israel Hamas war. And we were like, dude, the whole point of this article is that it's not an Israel Hamas war, it's an attack on the population of Gaza. But the, you know, so that kind of thing was frustrating. And that was why I, I really tried to emphasize that this, the shooting of children in the head in, in the catchment, like, because it's not, it's not like, oh, I saw it once one place and maybe one other. Like, you could argue that one child shot in the head was an accident. Or a crossfire or just some sadistic soldier who's a psychopath. You know, we have those in our society. I'm sure Palestinians have that too. Everybody has that in their society. There, There are violent, crazy people everywhere. But the, when you are talking about in the catchment area of every hospital in the Gaza Strip for more than a year, at that point, a child is being shot in the head every day or, you know, regularly, meaning almost on a daily basis. That can't possibly be an accident. The Israeli military is extremely sophisticated. They have body cameras. I've been told a lot of the sniper scopes themselves have cameras. There's obviously cameras on every drone. All of the drones, missiles themselves also have camera. There's cameras everywhere. They know exactly what's going on. You know, the, the, the, the killing of the Red Crescent workers and civil defense workers recently illustrates it. The, the, the Times actually had a good report on it just yesterday where they were, they told, they talked about how they were shown drone footage and stuff like that. And even the Israeli, Even the drone footage that the Israelis were showing them contradicted what they were saying. But the, but yeah, so like, the, the. They know what's going on. It's not like they don't have any clue who their soldiers are shooting. And furthermore, if you read the Israeli press or if you look at breaking the silence, any of these people, they've all pointed out the same thing. I'm hardly the first person to mention it, that there just are no rules of engagement that you can, the, the soldiers can do whatever they want. Well, if that went on for, you know, two weeks after October 7th, I think, I think people could, you know, at least rationally say, oh, well, they're in a rage. People are just furious. Okay, fine, a month, two months, six months, a year. No, that's not, that's not believable anymore. Even if the soldiers are still acting out of a rage, the Israeli military has a policy of not doing anything about it at that point, even if it's just by default. You know, so that, that was why we focused on that now when I was back. And this, this is. I'm, I'll mention this for two reasons. I didn't see, at least I haven't reviewed my, my notes since I came back, but I'm pretty sure I, I don't believe I ever saw a child shot in the head. This time that I was in Gaza, I saw plenty of people shot by Israelis, but none were children shot in the head. And I think the reason is Just because there are no ground troops in Khan Yunus. Now, there are in the far eastern side of the city, but they would go to European hospital. They wouldn't come to Nasser medical complex. On the. On. In communist proper. And on the west, it's almost all bombing. And in Rafa, because they. The. The invasion of Rafa hadn't started. When I was there in Rafa, they were just shooting individual people from this giant sniper tower that they've built in the. In the Philadelphia corridor. So. So it's just. It's not. It's. It's not the same thing as having ground troops throughout the city who feel like they can do whatever they want and they know they won't be punished for it. But it also goes back to the idea because, you know, the only. The only defense that somebody could have. I guess there's maybe two. One is that I'm lying, which doesn't track. Why would I do that? And even if I'm lying, what about everyone else who saw the same thing? It doesn't. Doesn't really make, like, why is John Kaler lying? Why is Adam Homily lying? Why is Mark Perlmutter lying? Why is Monica Johnson lying? You know, it doesn't make any sense. So there's that. But the second thing that people could say is, oh, you just don't realize they were shot by Hamas, not by the Israelis. Well, okay, well, that. That seems like it would require, like, the grandest conspiracy of all time to actually accomplish. Like, not one Palestinian has pointed out that, no, it was Hamas that shot my kid. Not like, you know, like a hundred thousand people are thought to have fled Gaza since this started. Not one of them has thought. I think, imagine what a celebrity that person would become. All their problems would be solved in life. They'd, you know, get all sorts of money from APAC for the rest of their life. Not one person is. No, really, I mean, just. Just imagine it. They'd be set for life. Not one. Then these are poor people living. Living like refugees. You know, not one person has said this because it isn't true. It's just completely ridiculous. Again, could Hamas accidentally have shot a kid in a crossfire? That's. That's possible. Could there be some Hamas lunatic who shot a kid thinking, ah, this is what's going to solve the Israel, Palestine? But, yeah, that's possible. But it doesn't explain the pattern. It doesn't explain the longevity of the pattern, doesn't explain the intensity. The. Right. This just. This is. These are silly arguments. You know, so, so that's why we focused on it. Yeah, but. Oh, but sorry, but the point I was.
- [38:38]
Chris Hedges
Oh, God, no.
- [38:40]
Dr. Firouz Sidwa
The last point I was going to make is that, you know, this, this idea that it's Hamas shooting these people. Well, then why, when there are no Israeli, there's, there's plenty of Hamas people in Kanyunis. At least I assume there are. Why aren't kids still getting shot in the head? You know, how did, how did you.
- [38:53]
Chris Hedges
Handle wounded, wounded fighters? Did you put them in? How did that work? So if, if somebody came in.
- [38:59]
Dr. Firouz Sidwa
Never saw one.
- [39:00]
Chris Hedges
Oh, really?
- [39:01]
Dr. Firouz Sidwa
No, I never saw one. This is, I, I have to admit that this is a minority position, what I'm about to say, but virtually no one. And I, I'd encourage you to ask other people who've worked there, virtually no one has ever encountered an, somebody that they were, were sure was a fighter. I, When I was at European, the week before I got there, people told me that there was one guy who came in with an entourage of other guys and, and it was kind of obvious that they were, they were militants. And this guy, I think he had, I think he had a partial amputation of his arm or something. And they didn't come in armed, but it was obvious who they were. And so they, but they, they didn't get aggressive with people. They just said, if you like, tell us what you need. They said, oh, we need this, this and this. They went and got it, they brought it back, they did an operation, and then they just whisked the guy out of the hospital almost immediately. Now, but that was literally the only person that I ever in, the only male I should say that I ever encountered who didn't come in with their family. And you can, you can, people can say whatever they want about Hamas, but nobody thinks they're dragging their wives out to the battlefield. Like, that's completely ridiculous. Know, Hamas films a lot of its operations against Israeli forces, and that's just not what's happening. Nor, nor do the Israelis even claim it is. They claim that they're using them as human shields when they're at home eating dinner. You know, so the, but yeah, no, honestly, I just never, never saw, never saw a combatant. There was one. It was probably March 8th or 9th before the ceasefire ended. In other words, there I saw one. I saw a pickup truck with two guys in the kind of typical Hamas garb. You know, the face covered, the, the vest, you know, the kind of military looking vest sort of thing, and with rifles of some kind, literally Just enter the hospital gate, drive through and exit the other gate. That was it. They were on the hospital property for like eight seconds. Like I, quite literally. And I, because I looked, I was like, oh, my God. I've never. Oh, they're gone. Okay. You know, they came in.
- [41:05]
Chris Hedges
Israel's always making this charge that hospitals are command and control underground tunnel complexes. Not that they've ever been able to provide any evidence. I want to talk about what's happening. I mean, so March 2nd, everything's cut off, including medical supplies. The last desalination plant, because they've cut electricity, is not producing clean water. Of course you have, you know, certainly malnutrition, if not cases of starvation, all sorts of diseases that come with having unclean water and camping next to fetid pools of open sewage, etc. What's happening? What's happening to the health system? What do you see happening? Is it. Is it. I mean, at a certain point, it's going to have to shut down.
- [41:53]
Dr. Firouz Sidwa
Yeah. There really. There is no signi. I hate saying this because I respect my Palestinian colleagues deeply and they're doing everything they can. There is no serious health system in Gaza anymore. Anymore. You know, Like I said, Nasser. Nasser is the, the flagship hospital in Gaza. And I. Everything that I did at Nasser Medical Complex to save people's lives I could do in my house if you just gave me a knife and some suture and an anesthetic machine. I mean, this literally. There's nothing, nothing else is going on. You know, Mark, I keep mentioning Mark Perlmutter. He's a, He's a Jewish American hand surgeon, orthopedic surgeon that I, I'd been to Gaza with twice now. He, he talked about how he was actually having to implant not pins, but drill bits themselves into children's bones in order to, to fixate them. Because the, they just don't have pins that are the size needed for, for children. The. Just. There's. There's no way to do anything. You know, trauma surgery is, is really the most basic part of surgery. The, the, the goal is to stop people from bleeding to death. That's it. That doesn't require a whole lot of fancy equipment or. Because you just don't have time to use it. Right. The. That's. That's just not what it is. So, you know, for me, I wasn't out of, you know, if, If I, like I said, if I have a scalpel and I have even one type of suture, I can do the vast majority of things I need to. But that's not, that's not real medical care. You know, real medical care is putting people back together and that's just, it's just not, it's just not possible. It's not doable at all. The, and that's leaving aside like, like, like you mentioned the, the Ahli Baptist Hospital in, in northern Gaza, it basically doesn't exist anymore. I mean it's, the like part of the building is still standing. That's true. And doctors can walk back into it if they want to, but there's no supplies. There's nothing there. There's absolutely nothing there. And the same is true of the vast majority of hospitals in Gaza. There is just nothing there. You know, even the ones that are standing that are still physically, you know, the building still physically exists. Just because doctors are inside a building, that doesn't make it a hospital. And like you said, nothing, you know, nothing has gotten through since March 2nd. So we're going on six weeks now and the entire Strip has been in a mass casualty event continuously since then. So you know, yeah, there's just, there is not. I, I can't imagine that the healthcare system can function for more than another month or so. I just, I don't, I, I mean like function at all, like in literally in any capacity. I don't know how women who need C sections will get them. I don't know how people who even just have regular old general surgery problems will, will be able to get them. I don't know how a kid that has asthma will be able to get Albuterol. I don't know how somebody with heart disease will be able to get their medications like, just like leaving aside the, the trauma. But yeah, the, the, the, the, and then on top of that, like you mentioned, the whole population is, is being starved. Literally no food has gone into Gaza for six weeks and, and, and the entire local food production system has been destroyed. The only place you can actually grow food in Gaza right now is in the sand, you know, which is not do like because you know, Gaza, Gaza is basically fertile to the east of the Salahudeen Road, right in the middle of the territory and not fertile to the, to the west of it, near the, near to the, to the ocean. But the Israelis are occupying everything east of the Salahuddin Road now. So there you can't even grow food except in the sand. Maybe some cucumbers will grow outside your, your tent or something. But that's, that's where people are getting food now. They're, you know, and actually it's not even, it's, it's not even like it just started happening. I like, like we said, the, the block, the, the cutoff of any entry of anything into Gaza started on March 2nd. I got there on March 6th and I was, we ate meat that day. Now I don't really care about eating meat, but it's just to illustrate because this is a meat eating culture. I ate meat that day and then we didn't eat any, any. I mean, no meat, no chicken, no fish, no kind of animal protein until I think it was like March 29th when somebody, somebody found some chicken somehow. And we're Westerners, we have all the money in the world compared to everybody else, but there's just none of this available. You know what I mean? It just literally isn't available. I think Mark told me that at one point because he went up to Oxa Martyrs Hospital in the, the town just north of Kanye. It's called Diral Bola. He went up there and I think he told me he paid $7 for a can of tuna. Now someone might say, well, that was somebody taking advantage of him. But no, he had, he had, he had a local go get it for him and it was $7. You know, like when, when I was walking around the, the market that was right outside of Nasser medical complex. It's actually exactly where that, I'm sure you saw the video of that poor journalist being burned alive in his tent. That tent was literally right outside the, right outside of the Nasser medical complex. I had hung out with those journalists many times in that tent. The. I didn't know that particular fellow. But. Yeah, but the, but walking around in that little market. The eggs, when I got there. So just four days after the blockade started, when I got there, eggs were about 50 cents each, which is what I pay for like nice organic eggs in California. Obviously nobody there can afford that. When I left, it was more than $2 an egg. You know, I think they were asking for nine shekels per egg. This just, there's no, no possible way that anybody can afford actually. I guess so that's even closer to $3 an egg, actually. So the, that there's just no way, there's no way for people to obtain even food, which of course means they're much, much more vulnerable to, to, to traumatic injuries, to infections afterwards, to, you know, pregnant women can't breast, or pregnant women, once they give birth, can't breastfeed, so their infants are dying. It's not, it's not really well appreciated how severe the starvation problem is in Gaza. You know, the Integrated Food Security face classification is the, the technical group that monitors food insecurity in the world. Their last report on Gaza I think came out two months ago if I remember, or maybe, maybe last month. But there I just, I just did the calculations yesterday or the day before. So I might have the numbers not exactly correct, but it's approximately something like this. If their classifications of people, they, they classify households into different phases of food insecurity and given how many, how many people are in class five, class four, class three, those are the, those are the three classes per mortality actually increases if there, if there are estimates of who's in which category are correct, there should be about 140 people dying of starvation related causes every day in Gaza. And that's actually an underestimate because Gaza is, is an unusually heavily child population and children under the age of five are much more vulnerable to starvation than anybody else, especially newborns obviously. And then their projections, because they usually do, the IPC reports usually say what happened before this report came out and what do we expect to happen afterwards. If they're, if their projections are correct, it's almost 200 people a day that are going to start dying of starvation related causes in Gaza. And you know, the, the, the story of starvation in Gaza is not a well understood one. The, the extreme nature of how hungry Gaza has been for the past, you know, 18 months at this point is it is not something that has been widely reported on.
- [49:25]
Chris Hedges
And the other, the, the other issue is, you know, anecdotally from Palestinians I know who have family in Gaza. Many of them are not listed as dead, they just haven't heard from them for months. So I've got to believe that the numbers of dead are far, far higher than the roughly 50,000 put out by the Ministry of Health.
- [49:44]
Dr. Firouz Sidwa
Yeah, so when, so me and in October, me and 98 other healthcare professionals wrote an open letter to the Biden administration. I, when, when Trump was elected I modified it and sent it to him too through contacts in his, his campaign. But in that, in that letter we wrote an appendix. If anybody wants to read it, it's at Gaza healthcare letters.org we wrote an appendix or. Yeah, basically I wrote an appendix in which again looking at the IPC's phase classification, the IPC's reports on Gaza up until that point, which was September of 2024, it was basically impossible to estimate that fewer than 62,000 people had starved to death in Gaza. The technical term is died of starvation related causes. But they mean the same thing to most people. And now I do want to say that, like, the leading historian of famine is a guy named Alex De Waal. He's at the Tufts World Peace Institute or something like that. He disagrees. He doesn't think that the numbers are that high, but he still, he says that there's no way it's under 10,000. I shouldn't. Let me. Let me not miss misquote him. He says that it is almost certainly 10,000 or more. So, you know, the like. But that there. There's two things with that number. One, the. The moral. I don't know. I'm not very good with English, but more the moral dastardliness of, oh, well, it's only 10,000 who care. Like, no, like, starving 10,000 people to death is a shocking crime, but it kind of tells you something about ourselves that we don't even know to within, like, an order of magnitude how many people we've starved to death in Gaza, most of whom will have been small children. Like, you know, that that's terrifying. So that's one major cause of mortality that's not reported. The second is what we were talking about a minute ago. I am quite sure that very, very few combatants are actually counted in the Ministry of Health calculation, you know, every time. Or not calculation, the Ministry of Health reporting. So, like, every time, the. The, you know, the Times or the poster, whoever reports, the BBC, any of them report, they say the Hamas Ministry of Health says 51, 000 people have died. However, they do not distinguish between combatants and civilians. Now, that's technically accurate because nobody, you know, that's not how hospitals do things. Like, I never asked anybody. Excuse me, sir, are you a combatant or a civilian? I just, you know, it's ridiculous. But the. That's just not, you know, medical care is provided to all people, including soldiers. Like, the oldest part, you know, the first Geneva convention is from 1864. You probably know this better than I do, but it's from 1864. And it's specifically about the care and the protection afforded to wounded combatants, Not. Not civilians. So wounded combatants have, since, you know, since before the American Civil War was over, have been protected people under international law. You don't. It doesn't matter who they are. Like, you. You take care of people who need to be taken care of, and that's regardless of their national affiliation. Right? Like, if an Israeli soldier comes into the hospital, for some reason, I'll take care of him, too. Honestly, if Benjamin Netanyahu comes in I'll take care of him. I don't, don't really want to, to be honest, but I'd still do it because that's what being a doctor is. But the, but yeah. So I, I, I very seriously doubt that anyone who was actually particip, not anybody, but very, very few people who are actually participating in combat have been brought to civilian hospitals in Gaza. And there's a few reasons. I mean, number one, almost everybody that I have ever seen in the hospital came in with their family, they were all wounded together. And like I said, Hamas is just not dragging their, their kids and their wives out to the, out to the battlefield. But number two, Hamas is engaged or not. Not just Hamas. All the Palestinian armed groups are engaging Israeli soldiers in these areas that are already severely bombed out, destroyed, et cetera, et cetera. If one of them gets shot, I don't see how they could even possibly recover him. I mean, I'm no military expert, I don't want to pretend I am, but you know, the Israelis, when they're, when they're directing heavy loads of gunfire or tank shelling or whatever at a, at a combatant in the middle of an actual, not just bombing the crap out of helpless people, but an actual armed confrontation, I just cannot imagine the scenario where they survive long enough to get trucked.
- [54:09]
Chris Hedges
Well, this is with Yaya Sinwar. He was wounded. He was, yeah.
- [54:12]
Dr. Firouz Sidwa
No, he has, it's a great example.
- [54:14]
Chris Hedges
Pretty badly wounded. And the drone found him and killed him.
- [54:17]
Dr. Firouz Sidwa
Yeah, it's a, well, it's a pretty good example. Cinnamore is a good example, you know, because he, he was, you know, he was walking around. You know, they claimed he was in a, spending his billions of dollars in a tunnel or something. But the, he was walking around, he, they encountered Israeli troops. I think his arm was blown off by a tank shelling. And then, and this isn't, this is in Rafa, right. So then he makes his way into a bombed out building like you said. A drone finds him and then a tank shells again because they just thought he was some random guy. But yeah, when the Israelis are actually confronted by anyone who presents any possible threat to them, they're, the level of violence somehow increases even further compared to the, the violence that's being used against civilians. So I just have a hard time believing, Again, I'm not a military expert. If somebody were to explain to me while I'm wrong, I'm happy to listen, but I, I cannot imagine, Like I said, the only, literally the only story I have heard from Any, and I've asked people before. The only story I've ever heard was that one guy who came in with that arm injury that I mentioned. That is the only combatant I know that anyone has encountered in a hospital in Gaza. And again, I should say suspected combatant, but probably was. But that, that's it. That's it. And so I'm sure that these people are being just buried and, and then Hamas is going on with it's life. But secondly, there's a huge number of civilians who have definitely the, the way this, these Hamas numbers. Right. The, the Ministry of Health. First of all, the Ministry of Health is not actually run by Hamas. It's, it's, it's actually one of the only things in Gaza that's run jointly by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. But the, those numbers come specifically from hospital databases of who died. I've looked at the electronic database at Nasser Medical Complex. It's very simple, it's very straightforward. Category 7 means people who were injured in the, they categorize patients. Category 7 is people who were injured specifically in the context of conflict. So bombing, shooting, whatever. Not, not. I got beat up in a family dispute. Not, not, not like that. So specifically that context of advance, they call it, they call it, it's category seven. And then category 63 is people who were killed in that context. All the Ministry of Health is reporting is the reports that they get from hospitals on a daily or weekly basis. I'm not honestly sure, probably a daily basis of category 63. And then they're reporting category seven is the injured. That's it. There's no way that everybody in Gaza is conspiring to inflate this number. But so the important thing to realize is that's only people who have been delivered to hospital morgues. Now if you're like, like when I was in Khan Yunis, right. The, the first time when I was at European Hospital, I did, and I mean this seriously, I did one hemorrhage control operation. Like, in other words, I stopped one person from bleeding to death while I was there in two weeks. And the reason again was because there were ground troops in Kanye, it just wasn't possible to move people quickly to a hospital. So if you're, if your house, if your house is bombed or if your neighborhood is in lockdown because there are Israeli troops and your kid or your wife or your husband or whoever is shot, and then three days later you'd be able to take them to the hospital just so that they can be pronounced, you know, they're dead. They've been dead for days. Why would you make that dangerous trip over to the hospital? What, just so I can include one more person in my, in my death gun? No, of course not. You're just going to bury.
- [57:41]
Chris Hedges
And the other thing is you have whole apartment blocks obliterated and, and then, yeah, everyone inside your kid, you can't dig them out. I mean, this happened to a friend of mine, is his wife's sister and her family.
- [57:52]
Dr. Firouz Sidwa
Really? Yeah. No, and actually when you, when you drive around, when you drive around, you'll see graffiti all over the place on buildings that says, Osama is buried here. Muhammad is buried here. You know, it's, it's just, it's everywhere. It's literally everywhere. And the, the, the civil defense has been estimating10,000 people are under the rubble since January of last year. You know, I mean it's, it's, it's just completely, you know, if Theodore postal, he's, he's MIT's leading missile technology expert, from what I understand. He's a Jewish fellow and he, he class just so people understand where he's coming from. He's a Jewish fellow and he classifies, he, he's. When he talks about the October 7 attacks, he describes those attacks as having been genocidal, like he thinks they were. That was the intent of them, which is, I don't agree with him, but that's fine. It's his perspective. He himself just casually, and he's not saying it carelessly, I don't mean to say it that way, but he just casually estimates that at least hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in Gaza by bombing. He says, just look at the place. What are you talking about? How could hundreds of thousands of people not have been killed in this bombing? Now the Gazans have a, you know, again, you know this better than I do. Gazans have a very long history of surviving under bombardment. So they may have an unusual propensity for surviving such circumstances, but it, everything has a limit, you know, but then there's. Sorry, just to, just in case people are interested in these, these data points. The Lancet, it might have been the Lancet open or the actual lancet, I can't remember. But the Lancet is a prestigious British medical journal. Maybe in at least a few months ago, maybe more than that, they published a, a paper which, it's, it's not really a study. There's no statistics involved. The, the paper was done by researchers. I, if I'm remembering correctly, in Japan, Canada and Maybe the United, I think the United States also, I think, I think at Yale, but I could be, I could be wrong. But anyway, a big international team and what they did was they got the raw data from the Ministry of Health in Gaza. Not the, not the aggregate data, but literally line by line, person by person, name, birthday, ID number, everything. They got the entire database up until the point where they got it. Then they looked through international kind of like Air wars does. They look through international news things and they news reports and then they also looked at social media postings and, and they spent God knows how much time just correlating each and every one of these records saying is it, you know, what's, you know, is it possible that Muhammad so and so killed on this day? Who is this age in this location? You know, like literally just, just, just cross referencing each and every one of these things, they found that the, the Ministry of Health numbers under report even publicly verifiable deaths by about 40%. Right, 40%. Now that's. So that's, that's one major thing. But the other thing that I would encourage people to do is to look at air, you know, air wars. Air wars is a British NGO which basically looks at the, the impact that modern, modern military, especially air force bombing campaigns have on civilians. Now they wrote one of the most shocking reports I've ever read in my life about just the first 25 days, 24 days actually of the Israeli bombing campaign in, in Gaza. So October, not the restarting, not March 18th, where I'm talking about October 7th to October 30th or 31st. Excuse me, of, of 2023, in that less than one month, the same number of children, 1900 can are verifiably can be. Can be verified to have been killed the same number of children as in the entire most deadly year for children in another conflict that they've ever found, which was Syria in 2016. If I'm remembering the year. Right. In 24 days in Gaza, a territory of 2.2 million people, the same number of children were killed as in the deadliest year in conflict that they had ever found previously, which was Syria, which is a much, much larger country. Actually don't know serious population. Maybe you do, but the. That's insane. This is completely. This is there. There is no like, it's. This is. And it's hard to, it's hard to explain sometimes to people. Not that, not that you needed to explain, but what has been done to Gaza over the past 18 months is quite literally unique. Nothing of this intensity and magnitude and duration has ever been done, especially not to a territory this small. You know, the destruction of Germany during World War II doesn't even come close. The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic weapons doesn't even come close. Close. Like that's what. It's, it's crazed. The, the level of violence that has been inflicted in this place is completely insane. And the, it's, it's just beyond anything that anyone has ever seen anywhere else before. And that there's, there's a reason for that. It's that the world's super. It's not Israel attacking Gaza, it's the United States using Israel's army to attack Gaza. In any, in any practical sense? Well, yeah. When you, when you send the entire weight of the American military to bomb a completely helpless civilian population, which is half children and now living in improvised shelters, not even in the concrete shelters that they were living in before, what. This is exactly what's going to happen. Yeah, it's, it's hardly surprising. And so like you said, the death toll is certainly far, far, far higher. And I, I honestly wouldn't be surprised if it's, or if it's like nearly an order of magnitude off from reality. You know, can't prove it because there's no data available because the Israelis won't let anybody collect data. But the, it is just a, it's an unbelievably what this will, this event will be studied for a long time, you know, if humans are still around to do it. And I, I don't think we're going to come out looking very good at the end of this.
- [64:27]
Chris Hedges
No. Thank you very much. For us. I want to thank Diego, Thomas, Max and Sophia who produce the show. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.