Caught in the crossfire

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Thursday, December 5th.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: an eye-witness in Gaza.

This is a war story, so you may want to press pause and come back later if you have young ones around. But do come back because it’s an important story.

REICHARD: You have about 20 seconds to do that.

This week, a major supplier of aid to Gaza suspended deliveries after armed gangs looted two of its trucks.

Since the war started, Israel says it’s been trying to get food and medical supplies to the civilians in Gaza. But Israel says Hamas is stealing aid and using places like hospitals to hide. And now, the nearly two million people living there have been on the brink of famine for months with hospitals running out of supplies.

MAST: Here’s WORLD’s Mary Muncy with what one doctor saw in Gaza.

AUDIO: [TRANSPORTING PATIENT]

MARY MUNCY: Last March, Dr. Feroze Sidhwa followed a hospital bed through European Hospital in Gaza. People slept on the floor along the hallway.

SIDHWA: It looked and smelled like a zombie apocalypse because it's kind of what it was.

He was following his patient into the operating room. A little girl walked by and he fist-bumped her.

SIDHWA: Gazans have children. There's kids literally everywhere.

Sidwha is an American trauma surgeon who spent two weeks in Gaza with the World Health Organization. At the time, there were 1,500 people admitted to the 220-bed hospital and it was serving as a shelter. Some of the families hung up sheets around their living quarters. The gurney Sidwha was following snagged on one of them.

Before the war, European Hospital was a place where the wealthy paid to get procedures done. Now, it’s one of the last few operating hospitals in the region and it’s helping anyone who can get there.

Since Hamas attacked Israel from within Gaza on October 7th, Israel has been on a mission to get hostages back and to destroy the terrorist group.

Meaning Hamas put Palestinians in the middle of a war.

BBC NEWS: There are reports that dozens of Palestinians were killed overnight by two Israeli airstrikes in northern Gaza.

ABC NEWS: The UN again warning that the Gaza strip could reach total famine in just six weeks now.

CBS NEWS: Two UN agencies say Palestinian gangs who are rivals of Hamas violently looted nearly 100 aid trucks recently after entering Gaza.

Some experts say Israel is doing everything possible to reduce civilian deaths while still routing Hamas. Sidhwa does not believe October 7th was justified, but he does believe many people in Gaza feel oppressed and caught in the middle. That’s why he went there.

SIDHWA: I'm used to dealing with death. That's not such a problem for me. But I don't want us imposing death on other people when there's no reason for it, when there's no benefit to it, yeah.

In October, Sidhwa and over 200 other doctors signed an open letter to President Joe Biden calling for an arms embargo. Their letter includes reports of children starving and people living in desperate poverty, many also said they witnessed children shot in the head.

AUDIO: [WALKING THROUGH THE HOSPITAL]

On his first day in Gaza, Sidwha was touring the hospital when he saw two children lying next to each other. Both were on ventilators with bandaged heads.

SIDHWA: The nurse kind of pointed to her head and just said, shot, shot.

Sidwha and another doctor couldn’t believe two little kids would be shot in the head. So they assumed the nurse meant shrapnel wounds.

SIDHWA: But then I looked at them, and I was like, they don't look like they were in an explosion.

As he and the other doctor examined them, they realized the children were already dead. They looked at their CT scans.

SIDHWA: Sure enough, they both had bullets in their heads.

Sidhwa recorded a total of 13 children shot in the head in 14 days. He thinks there were more, he just didn’t write them down.

SIDHWA: We regularly saw children shot in the chest, shot in the arms, shot in the legs. But for obvious reasons, the ones that had single shots to the head, or sometimes even a shot to the head and the chest were the ones that really stood out.

Sidhwa and the other doctors don’t know who shot them or why. Many likely caught stray bullets, but Sidhwa doesn’t think all of the wounds were accidental.

Sidhwa and others took pictures of the children and their X-rays.

When I asked the Israeli Defense Force about claims that they were to blame, a spokesperson said they work to protect children and civilians, that they are not committing war crimes. I couldn’t contact Hamas.

Sidhwa had brought 800 pounds of supplies with him. Other doctors brought more. But they still ran out of many of them by about halfway through the trip.

SIDHWA: We had one mass casualty event where we just kind of ran out of gloves. There just were no gloves.

The water had also stopped running—a semi-regular occurrence while he was there.

SIDHWA: I was literally, like, making incisions in people without gloves on which I've never had to do before.

He didn’t write down details about any patients that day and there were other days like that—where there was too much going on in the moment and he couldn’t remember what happened at the end of the day.

But he’ll never forget some of them—like a little girl named Juri. He and other doctors operated on her for about 30 hours over 10 days before she was stable enough to evacuate to Egypt.

SIDHWA: There's hundreds of kids like her just at European Hospital, and there's thousands, or maybe even tens of thousands in Gaza. It’s impossible.

Even if you could somehow transfer them to the US, he says the country just wouldn’t have enough ICU beds. It’s overwhelming. But he’s going back in January to deal with it the best way he can—one person at a time.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Mary Muncy.

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