“When children no longer want to live”: the testimony on Gaza of a US surgeon | EUROtoday

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“Children should be protected. In Gaza, these protections have simply disappeared.” It is with these phrases that Feroze Sidhwa, Californian traumatological surgeon, has opened his testimony to the United Nations Security Council, tracing a devastating image of the humanitarian state of affairs within the Gaza Strip. The physician operated on the sphere in Khan Youunis from 25 March to eight April final yr, collaborating in two well being missions in one of many territories most affected by the bombings and the collapse of the well being system.

“I am not here as a politician,” mentioned Sidhwa in entrance of worldwide delegates, “but as a doctor who testifies to the deliberate destruction of health care, the target of my colleagues and the cancellation of a people.” According to the surgeon, the medical buildings are collapsing: “I performed surgical interventions on dirty floors, without anesthesia, while children died for reasons perfectly preventable due to the Israeli block of health supplies.”

The testimony entered essentially the most dramatic particulars of the expertise on the sphere: “Most of my patients were pre -adolescent children, with bodies shattered by explosives and torn by metal splinters. Many died. Those who survived often woke up discovering that all his family had disappeared and often has suicide trends.”

Sidhwa additionally instructed troublesome episodes even to think about: pregnant ladies with “The completely destroyed pelvis and fetuses cut in two”, and a chilling statistics in accordance with which 83% of American medical doctors in service in Gaza noticed kids affected within the head or chest. “This is not a failure of the system,” he mentioned, “but the systematic dismantling through violations of international law.” He then denounced the induced famine, which “is killing more civilians than bombs”.

The culminating level of his report was the story of the huge inflow of accidents to the Nasser Hospital on March 18: “221 traumatized patients who arrived in one morning, 90 already dead, almost half were children.” According to the physician, no well being system, nonetheless sturdy, might have resisted such a wave of victims.