Volunteer surgeons in Gaza describe ‘horrifying violence deliberately directed at civilians,’ children

09/27/2024 / By News Editors

Leaflets containing the eyewitness testimony of two U.S. surgeons claiming an active genocide in Israel have been confiscated by United Nations security guards from the hands of U.N. delegates.

(Article Frank Wright republished from LifeSiteNews.com)

In the most damning account of Israel’s campaign in the Gaza strip, two U.S. surgeons have given eyewitness accounts of the routine execution of children and medical staff by IDF troops in a Special Appeal to the United Nations.

The following Special Appeal to the United Nations is being issued by two American doctors, Dr. Mark Perlmutter and Dr. Feroze Sidhwa. Dr. Perlmutter is the president of the World Surgical Foundation, and a past president of the United States section of the International College… pic.twitter.com/B2iQaCN9E4

— Jose Vega — Vote Vega & Sare! (@JosBtrigga) September 24, 2024

Dismissing Israel’s claims to be targeting Hamas as a fiction, Dr. Mark Perlmutter argues instead: “The major target [of the Israeli army] is the elimination of the Palestinian population.”

Acting on the orders of “unnamed superiors,” security officers outside the U.N. General Assembly in New York took leaflets containing Perlmutter’s testimony from the hands of U.N. delegates engaged in debates concerning Israel and its actions. In a video report documenting the incident, activist Jose Vega asks why the authorities would seek to prohibit this information being seen by U.N. decision makers.

The answer is the extraordinary horror contained in the eyewitness testimony of two volunteer U.S. surgeons, who documented the U.S. taxpayer-funded murder and mass starvation of children, healthcare workers, journalists, and the intentional destruction of an “entire society” in Gaza.

What Perlmutter is describing is an organized genocide.

Perlmutter is the president of the World Surgical Foundation, and a past president of the United States section of the International College of Surgeons. In an uncommonly frank Western media interview with CBS News from July 21, Perlmutter says:

In 40 mission trips over 30 years – Ground Zero, earthquakes – all of that combined does not equal the level of carnage that I saw against civilians in just my first week in Gaza.

I have seen more incinerated children than I have ever seen in my life, combined. More shredded children in just the first week. Missing body parts, crushed by buildings or bomb explosions.

In a video report linked in the confiscated material, and removed from the sight of U.N. delegates, Perlmutter recounts how he traveled to Gaza with U.S. trauma surgeon Feroze Sidhwa.

In their combined 57 years of medical volunteering, they have been present at 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the Haitian earthquake, and have treated casualties in the Ukraine war and across Africa.

In a report published by Politico in July, both surgeons said the horrors they had witnessed in Gaza eclipsed anything they had seen before:

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.

What did they see? Their report says:

We started seeing a series of children, pre-teens 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.

In almost a year of Israel’s war in Gaza, countless images and stories of atrocity have emerged, yet few communicate the obscene magnitude of the suffering conveyed in Perlmutter and Sidhwa’s story.

The evidence presented by these two surgeons is an excruciating eyewitness testimony to a large scale program of deliberate extermination. This is the reason “higher ups at the U.N.,” as Vega reported, wanted to keep this testimony out of the sight of U.N. delegates.

Horrifying violence on civilians

On arrival in Gaza, Perlmutter reports he “immediately found evidence of horrifying violence deliberately directed at civilians and even children. A three-year-old boy shot in the head, a 12-year-old girl shot through the chest, an ICU nurse shot through the abdomen…”

Perlmutter and fellow surgeon Feroze Sidhwa traveled together to Gaza in March 2024.

“What we found in Gaza is a society that has been entirely destroyed.” Sidhwa said that “everyone we encountered, from newborns to the elderly, is malnourished,” and the water chemically poisoned.

Medical workers tortured, killed

The doctors lamented “attacks on the healthcare infrastructure and healthcare workers,” including “torture, abduction, and torment” of doctors, nurses, and medical students.

Heads of hospital departments received “constant death threats” from the Israelis, says Sidhwa, “incidentally all funded by our own government.”

Perlmutter tells one story as an example of the targeting of healthcare workers. A Gazan surgical nurse, Tamer, claims to have been ordered at gunpoint to stop operating on a patient when an Israeli soldier burst into his operating room.

Tamer refused. He was shot in the leg, “his bones blasted across the room.” Medics treated Tamer, filling the void in his leg with surgical cement. The next day he was kidnapped by Israeli soldiers. The account of his ordeal was continued in the Politico piece:

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.

Tamer received no medical treatment and was handcuffed throughout.

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 a European Hospital.

When asked to comment on Tamer’s treatment, the IDF replied with a denial that its soldiers had raped a detainee at Sde Teiman, despite the incident having been captured on video and broadcasted on Israeli television.

Perlmutter wrote:

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.

Images from Facebook, taken by Feroze Sidhwa, via X. Tamer after being shot, following treatment at the European Hospital on his release, and on leaving the hospital.

In his report written for Politico, Perlmutter recounts how the Gazan doctors and nurses in the European Hospital “were simply waiting to die, and that they hoped Israel would get it over with sooner rather than later.”

The hospital’s director had fled to Egypt “after his home was destroyed and his family threatened.”

Most of the remaining staff had been kidnapped and tortured, Perlmutter said, adding:

They all told us a slightly different version of the same horror story: in captivity, they were barely fed, continuously abused, and ultimately dumped naked on the side of a road. Many said they were subjected to mock executions and other forms of mistreatment and torture.

90% of victims are children

Perlmutter said that the operating theater at the European Hospital was “the largest emergency room still in operation in Gaza.” With Israeli bombing timed to coincide with evening family mealtimes, patients would “flood in” following Israeli airstrikes.

Dr. Samer Attar has created a video compilation of the Gaza you haven’t seen, recorded on a volunteer medical mission into Gaza. Caution, the video is disturbing, but necessary to watch.

According to Perlmutter, “90 percent of the patients arriving on gurneys were children – toddlers, teenagers, and infants. Rarely an adult.” On “four gurneys,” he said, “we would have 12 to 15 kids,” with up to four children on each gurney. “A third were dead, a third were dying in front of us, and a third would make it to the operating room.”

Perlmutter said then that “80 percent of those I took to the operating room were children, most of them toddlers or infants.”

The remaining 20 percent of victims were often other healthcare workers, as well as mothers and the elderly:

The other targeted group in this 20 percent that weren’t children were healthcare workers.

A surprising number of specifically targeted healthcare workers and their universal story was “I’m walking to work and right before I got to the hospital grounds I felt a burning pain rip through my shoulder – or my chest.”

Perlmutter said “those that survived, we operated on.” They would often be left paralyzed, with “devastating” wounds.

‘Not once’ a single combatant among the victims

“Not once did we see anyone who could remotely be described as a combatant,” described Perlmutter. Instead, “We took bullets out of kids.”

The physician related how these shootings could have been nothing but intentional:

I personally saw two children that were shot twice by high caliber bullets.

Both of these children were shot dead center in the chest, right where I would put my stethoscope – and a second bullet right in front of the hole of their ear.

Perlmutter explained these children have been deliberately killed by a skilled sniper, stating that “one father felt his kid being pulled out of his arm, and then watched his son get shot a second time, at a different angle, when he was already on the ground.”

“No child gets shot twice by a sniper by mistake,” said Perlmutter.

“I myself also saw 13 children who were shot in the head,” said Sidhwa, who with Perlmutter was only in Gaza for two weeks.

On their return from Gaza, Perlmutter and Sidhwa published an open letter addressed to the U.S. leadership, in which they called for an end to the supply of weapons to Israel “as long as this genocide continues, until the Israeli siege of Gaza is lifted, and until an end to the occupation can be negotiated.”

Israel does not want peace

The European hospital in which Perlmutter and Sidhwa worked was blockaded by Israel in May, trapping international medics inside – including an American doctor – for two weeks.

On his return to the U.S., Dr. Adam Hamawy – an American citizen and former combat surgeon “known for saving the life of U.S. Senator Tammy Duckworth in Iraq 20 years ago” – wrote a letter to President Joe Biden. In it, he said: “I have never in my career witnessed the level of atrocities and targeting of my medical colleagues as I have in Gaza.”

Hamawy urged Biden to stop U.S. support for the war:

The children of Palestine are not safe. Civilians, population centers, are not safe. We, as humanitarian workers, are not safe. You have the power to end the invasion of Rafah and Gaza now.

The sad tale, documented below, reveals why there is so much violence in Israel:

As CNN reported, no medical team replaced the departed surgeons and doctors.

The European Hospital ran out of fuel to power its generators in mid-May, putting it largely out of service. The remaining medics and patients fled in July, following Israeli evacuation orders, leaving the hospital deserted.

One of the last remaining hospitals in Gaza has been shut down by Israel, just as it has repeatedly shut down attempts at a negotiated ceasefire – most recently with the assassination of the leader and chief negotiator of Hamas. Sidhwa himself supports this claim, in a comment attached to an open letter sent to President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris on the genocide, he and Perlmutter witnessed:

… it is not Hamas or the Palestinians who typically break ceasefires with Israel, but Israel that breaks ceasefires with Palestinian armed groups.

October 7 was the only major exception to this pattern that I’m aware of.

Sidhwa cites the “media picture” in the West for shaping this narrative.

Yet he is not alone in this view. The director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House, Bronwen Maddox, has recently concluded that, “Israel has no strategy for peace.” Maddox, a Middle East specialist, had also interviewed the deputy leader of Hamas who was assassinated by an Israeli drone strike in Beirut.

Killing the story

The mysterious seizure of some of the most damning testimony to emerge at the United Nations on Israeli war crimes is partnered with another: the intentional killing of journalists.

In July 2024, the Committee for the Protection of Journalists (CPJ) reported that 116 journalists and media workers have been killed since October 7 last year, making the 26 days following the outbreak of the war “the deadliest period for journalists” since its records began.

The CPJ says it is investigating a further “130 additional cases of potential killings, arrests and injuries” amid the rising death toll of over 42,000 Palestinians.

On September 16, the Gaza Health Ministry published the names of 34,344 dead victims of the war it has identified so far. Of the 649 pages, 215 list the names of children.

According to Le Monde, “over 60% of the dead are under 18, or over 60 or female.” That is to say, they are non-combatants. Civilians. Against claims that these numbers are unreliable, a study from British journal The Lancet found in January 2024 that there was “No evidence of inflated mortality reporting from the Gaza Ministry of Health.”

Despite the efforts of Israel and its powerful lobby to keep the facts out of the hands of policymakers and beyond the sight of the public, the evidence of an active genocide is now in plain view.

The message of Perlmutter is neither political nor partisan. It is not the only signal of the eliminationist strategy of the Zionists to emerge from the noise of Israel’s information war.

It is a call to the cause of life against the power of silence. Will it be enough to awaken the conscience of America?

Feroze Sidhwa posted an open letter signed by 45 American physicians and nurses who have volunteered in Gaza, documenting their experiences and concerns. It was addressed to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

You can watch Drs. Mark Perlmutter and Feroze Sidhwa’s account of their experiences in Gaza HERE.

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