This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Israel has unilaterally ended the two-month-old Gaza ceasefire agreement, launching a massive wave of airstrikes overnight that killed at least 400 people and wounded more than 560 others — numbers that are expected to rise with scores of victims still trapped in the rubble. Palestinian health officials say many of the dead are children.
The attacks began without warning, though earlier today Israel’s military warned residents of several parts of Gaza to “evacuate immediately” after declaring their neighborhoods to be “dangerous combat zones.”
This is a survivor of an Israeli attack on al-Mawasi area of Khan Younis.
SURVIVOR: [translated] We woke up and got out of our tents to the streets. They fired a missile here near us. We looked around and found fire coming from the strike. While we ran to see what happened, we found a second missile had been fired. The tents were on fire. The women started to scream, and the children were terrified. Of course, everything escalated suddenly. We ran toward the screams. Then we came here and started to pull out the injured people and those who had been martyred.
AMY GOODMAN: The White House said Israel gave the U.S. advance warning about its renewed assault on Gaza.
Even before the airstrikes, Palestinians were suffering from more than two weeks of an Israeli-imposed blockade on all humanitarian and fuel aid to Gaza. On Sunday, UNICEF reported a third of young children in northern Gaza are suffering from acute malnutrition, adding, quote, “1 million children are living without the very basics they need to survive — yet again,” unquote. Already strained from 15 months of war and a two-week siege, hospitals in Gaza are struggling to keep pace with this new wave of deadly attacks.
Just before today’s broadcast, we reached Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, an American trauma surgeon volunteering at Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, Gaza.
FEROZE SIDHWA: This is Feroze Sidhwa. I’m a trauma surgeon in California, currently volunteering at the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis on the western side of Khan Younis in Gaza.
Overnight, the Israelis resumed bombardment of Gaza. The latest reports are that about 400 people were killed. I know at least 40 arrived dead at our own hospital. Certainly many more went on to die, and many more will die in the future.
Overnight, I think — it’s hard to remember now, but I think I did six operations. I’m about to do a seventh one right now, which is why I can’t join you live. I apologize. You know, half of them were children. Half of the patients I saw in the ER were also children, just like last time when I was at Gaza European Hospital about a year ago. Half the victims were children. Half the operations I did were children. Probably a good third of them will go on to die, despite us being able to take care of them properly, just because we really — we can do the initial operations, but we don’t have the facilities or the ability to take care of them properly after that.
And on top of that, they’re all coming in malnourished. They’re all dehydrated. They’ve all had gastroenteritis constantly for the past 15 months. The whole human society here is just devastated, and that results in bad health outcomes, as you can imagine, especially when you get your intestines torn open.
One of my Palestinian colleagues, his father-in-law has been killed just, you know, a few hours ago. He was actually running the triage in the emergency room, so keeping people outside, getting — making sure that people could access the hospital who actually needed it, and the kind of what we call “walking wounded,” people who were injured but could wait to be seen, were kept in a separate place. His father-in-law was killed, and he found out about that like an hour into the process of a mass casualty event, just kept working, didn’t go to see him until he’d already been buried this morning, because he had to take care of his patients.
One of the women who I operated on, 29-year-old woman, her sacrum, the lowest bone on your spine, kind of between your spine and your pelvis, has a, I don’t know, probably tennis ball-sized hole in it, which is basically the whole sacrum. And her rectum was torn in half. Her bladder is injured. Her vagina is injured. You know, she’s a 29-year-old woman. She’s actually the sister of one of the doctors who works at the hospital. I didn’t find that out afterwards until after I operated on her. And, yeah, you know, it’s just — it’s obviously quite, quite devastating.
I suspected that the war would restart while I was here, while I was volunteering on this trip, because the Israelis basically announced that they would restart it while I was here. But nevertheless, it’s kind of heartbreaking to see, to see a return to that same bare level of just trying anything to survive, that the Palestinians have been forced to do for the — you know, for the past 15, 16 months. They got about, what, a month and a half break from it, had a little bit of normalcy, with the ability to eat with their families during Ramadan, even if it was in a tent, the ability to drink water that was at least desalinated, if not clean, and fit for human consumption. That’s all gone again.
And it’s all because we provide the funding, the diplomatic, the economic and the military support. And we don’t have to. We didn’t have to under Biden. We certainly don’t have to under Trump. Trump says he wants to end the endless wars. Well, OK, do it. It’s not that hard. All you have to do is stop providing the arms for them. But, yeah, Americans, I just hope people will do something about this and not let this happen again, another round of just extreme, senseless mass killing, mostly of children, mostly of refugees, and mostly of people who are literally barred from leaving this concentration camp that they were born into.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, trauma surgeon volunteering at Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, Gaza, with MedGlobal. Last year, he volunteered at the European Hospital in Khan Younis. To see our interview with him last week, when he just arrived at Nasser Hospital, go to democracynow.org.
