Since the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel that killed 1,200 and kidnapped 240 hostages, the Israeli military has waged war on Gaza for 21 months. The United Nations estimates that as of July 18 more than 58,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s air and ground attacks, including nearly 18,000 children, 10,000 women, and 4,500 elderly.
Israel’s monthslong blockade of virtually all humanitarian aid into Gaza has resulted in severe shortages of basic food and medical supplies. On July 20 alone, Israeli forces killed 115 Palestinians, most of whom were massacred while seeking food aid. The World Food Program warned that Gaza’s hunger crisis has reached new levels of desperation as at least 19 people reportedly died of starvation on July 20, including infants and babies. After Israel bombed Gaza’s only Catholic Church, killing 3 — including the parish priest — Pope Leo called for an end to the barbarity of war and protection of Gaza’s civilian population.
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with two American doctors who’ve volunteered their medical skills to save lives in Gaza over the past year. Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a trauma and critical care surgeon, worked at a hospital in Khan Younis in March and April in 2024 and 2025. Dr. Ayaz Pathan, an emergency room physician, volunteered in northern Gaza for three weeks last summer. Here they discuss the impact of Israel’s war on the civilian patients they treated, the many deaths that have been attributed to the controversial U.S. and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and its U.S. role in the war that now ranks as among the deadliest for civilians in the 21st century.
DR. FEROZE SIDHWA: My experience there was — which I think basically everyone’s experience there is — exactly what you would expect for a land under siege being starved and being constantly bombarded that’s populated by a population that’s half children. We mostly saw injuries in kids who were about 12 years old and under. I’d say that was about half of our patients, certainly half of the severely injured people.
And I’m a trauma surgeon, so my job is to stop people from bleeding to death, which I can do with pretty minimal resources. But that’s a very, very low bar for healthcare. Not bleeding to death is good, but that doesn’t mean you can have any kind of meaningful life afterwards. And especially in Gaza, where the vast majority of the injuries are from explosions. They’re not just bleeding to death, but their limbs are shattered. They might have traumatic brain injuries, their spinal cords are injured, things like that. So they need a great deal of reconstructive work and literally none of that is available in Gaza. It hasn’t really been for a year. There’s been a major effort by the Israelis to make sure that basically no useful instrumentation, none of the things that are needed for a hospital to function in any way can get in. So it’s a major problem.
It’s a hard place to work, I guess I would say as a physician. But what I think Americans need to know about it doesn’t really have much to do with the medical aspect of it. But I think Americans need to understand that we are responsible for it. The U.S. and Israel are starving the population. And not just under the Trump administration, but also under the Biden administration. It’s not Israel dropping bombs on Gaza. It’s the U.S. and Israel dropping bombs on Gaza. There are American planes dropping American bombs. They just happen to be flown by Israeli pilots.
It’s mostly American bulldozers shipped from, I believe Indiana, that are destroying Rafa, destroying Gaza City, destroying Beit Lahia. Then it goes on and on like this. It’s a joint U.S.-Israeli operation and the main thing for Americans to realize is that we’re not just complicit in it. We’re participating in it. And we can actually stop participating in at any time we want to. It just takes one phone call from the United States to tell the Israelis that we’re not going to send them any more weapons until they stop doing what they’re doing, and it’ll stop immediately.
SCOTT HARRIS: Thank you, Dr. Sidhwa. Dr. Patan, I’d like to ask you the same question. Share some of your experience working in Gaza amidst this horrendous war and what you think Americans should know about this conflict — that as Dr. Sidhwa reminded us, it’s really a U.S. policy there that’s being carried out.
DR. AYAZ PATHAN: Dr. Sidhwa is exactly right when he mentions that our experiences are all very similar. I spent the majority of my time in northern Gaza and I’ll tell you some of the things that stood out were the amount of destruction that was there. The infrastructure was completely destroyed. Roads, the hospitals. There really is no fully functioning hospital in Gaza. And that’s the reality, that about a third of the hospitals that existed before October are there, but none of them are actually functioning properly. Things like antibiotics, pain medicines like morphine, which is actually relatively cheap, and other supplies are restricted. I don’t even use the word limited because to Dr. Sidhwa’s point, this stuff could get in and is actually on the other side of the border, just not allowed to go in. And then the suffering, as he mentioned, is really just indiscriminate, right? So we saw mass casualty and incidences daily, if not hourly on some bad days.
Starvation was very widespread, and even worse since we’ve left. And that about 70 percent of the deaths that we saw were related to women and children because that reflects what is going on with the population there.
What do Americans need to know? I think that we are financially responsible. We are sharing intelligence. We’re providing direct military support. And probably worse than any of that is we’re supplying diplomatic protection right at the UN and Congress. We’re blocking or obstructing war crime investigations from the ICC or ICJ. We’re giving unprecedented amounts of money and really it makes me question the thought about America First under this administration.
We’re talking about over $40 billion of aid, and that’s with a B since October of 2023. And if you want to talk about what you could do with that, the list is really endless, right? You could end homelessness in this country twice. You can make community college free for 10 years. You could expand Medicaid. It’s just endless what we could do with that money if we used it for things as opposed to what we’re using it for in Gaza.
SCOTT HARRIS: Dr. Sidhwa, I’d like to ask your assessment of the U.S.-Israeli-backed food distribution system under the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Aid Foundation that replaced United Nations groups that have done humanitarian aid work in Gaza for decades. It’s been reported that under the GHF, more than 875 Palestinians have been killed by gunfire as they waited in line for food. Tell us what you may know about that group, if you would.
DR. FEROZE SIDHWA: It’s called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. It has to be the most Orwellian thing in the modern period. It’s a shockingly criminal enterprise. What this is, is a mercenary organization that is run by the United States. They have set up four or five, I can’t remember now. I believe it’s five points in Gaza. These are large facilities where the land has been completely leveled.
Now, before they even opened, there was a study posted at the Harvard Dataverse and there was actually an Israeli researcher. He works at Ben-Gurion University. I’m forgetting his name now. But he wrote just based on satellite analysis of what these compounds look like. He said that these compounds seem specifically designed to guarantee that the civilian population will come into contact with the Israeli military, that the Israeli military will start shooting at them and that they will have nowhere to flee.
That’s exactly what happened. What is happening right now is just an absolutely inexcusable atrocity. And if it happened anywhere else in the world, we would say it’s a revival of Nazism, to be perfectly honest.
For more information, visit Dr. Feroze Sidhwa’s website at ferozesidhwa.org. Follow Dr. Sidwa on BlueSky at @ferozesidhwa.org, on X at @ferozesidhwa and on Instagram at @fsidhwa. Follow Dr. Ayaz Pathan on X at @ayazpathan.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Dr. Feroze Sidhwa and Dr. Ayaz Pathan (25:39) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the related links section of this page. For periodic updates on the Trump authoritarian playbook, subscribe here to our Between The Lines Radio Newsmagazine Substack newsletter to get updates to our “Hey AmeriKKKa, It’s Not Normal” compilation.
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