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We Volunteered at a Gaza Hospital. What We Saw Was Unspeakable.

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Written by MARK PERLMUTTER and FEROZE SIDHWA MARK PERLMUTTER and FEROZE SIDHWA
Published: 22 July 2024 22 July 2024

American surgeons who witnessed the civilian carnage of the Israel-Hamas war.

GAZA — In the United States we would never dream of operating on anyone without consent, let alone a malnourished and barely conscious 9-year-old girl in septic shock. Nevertheless, when we saw Juri, that’s exactly what we did.

We have no idea how Juri ended up in the Gaza European Hospital preoperative area. All we could see was that she had an external fixator — a scaffold of metal pins and rods — on her left leg and necrotic skin on her face and arms from the explosion that tore her little body to shreds. Just touching her blankets elicited shrieks of pain and terror. She was slowly dying, so we decided to take the risk of anesthetizing her without knowing exactly what we would find.

In the operating room, we examined Juri from head to toe. This beautiful, meek little girl was missing two inches of her left femur along with most of the muscle and skin on the back of her thigh. Both of her buttocks were flayed open, cutting so deeply through flesh that the lowest bones in her pelvis were exposed. As we swept our hands through this topography of cruelty, maggots fell in clumps onto the operating room table.

Read more at: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/19/gaza-hospitals-surgeons-00167697

 

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