Wednesday, October 9, 2024

Opinion Today: What these doctors and nurses saw in Gaza

A survey of medical volunteers paints a horrifying picture.
Opinion Today

October 9, 2024

Author Headshot

By Jeremy Ashkenas

Graphics Director, Opinion

In late July, an open letter signed by 45 doctors, nurses and medical workers from the United States began circulating online, describing their experiences volunteering in Gaza in the past year.

Even for people steeped in the daily images of horror and suffering emerging from Gaza, what they had to say was shocking. One observation jumped out from the rest: The medical professionals had regularly treated small children, 10 years old or younger, who had been shot in the head or chest.

I felt compelled to learn more about what these doctors and nurses had seen, and I wanted to build a more detailed record of who had witnessed what. Working with the lead writer of the open letter, Feroze Sidhwa, a trauma and general surgeon who worked in Gaza for two weeks this spring, we came up with a series of questions and sent it out as a survey to Dr. Sidhwa's network of fellow volunteers. The 65 medical professionals who responded wrote detailed descriptions of what they had seen in Gaza while working there, in many cases backing up their stories with photo and video evidence of widespread hunger, violence directed toward children, and a crippling absence of even the most basic medical supplies.

Dr. Sidhwa's guest essay, which we published today, uses their testimony about the war in Gaza to argue that current U.S. law requires that America stop supplying Israel with weapons. As Dr. Sidhwa points out, these are some of the only independent observers Israel has allowed to enter Gaza since the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, 2023. Although many of them have family or cultural ties to Palestine, many do not, and were instead motivated by the same feelings of urgency that move doctors and nurses to volunteer in conflict zones worldwide.

They were needed. They went. They saw. And they are now speaking out with what feels like a single voice.

Read the guest essay:

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