Israeli forces bombed the largest hospital in southern Gaza on Sunday, killing at least five people and destroying a surgery ward just after U.S. doctors volunteering there gave an interview on CNN about Israel’s mass killings in Gaza, reports say.
An airstrike hit the second floor of the surgical building of Nasser Hospital, in Khan Younis. The attack ignited a fire and destroyed the ward, rendering it unusable.The Israeli military says that it killed a Hamas political official in the attack, who was reportedly receiving medical treatment there. The attack also killed a 16-year-old boy.
The boy was a patient of U.S. surgeon Feroze Sidhwa, who arrived in Gaza amid the ceasefire earlier this month. Sidhwa had operated on the boy, who he identified as Ibrahim, just two days ago, and the boy was on track to be discharged when Israel’s bomb hit.
Sidhwa, who hails from California, said he was on his way to replace Ibrahim’s dressings when Israel bombed the hospital.
“He would have gone home tomorrow. If I had been changing his dressings, as I planned to this evening, I probably would have been killed too. Attacking hospitals is a war crime, and it needs to stop,” Sidhwa said on social media.
“When they opened the blanket it was obvious that it was my patient Ibrahim that I’d operated on a few days ago. He was dead, he was dead as a doornail. His head would have been eviscerated, his pupils were fixed and dilated, he had no heartbeat, so he was dead,” Sidhwa added in an interview with The Independent. “He was doing perfectly well, and to have him be killed literally in his hospital bed, it’s not normal at all.”
Ibrahim was one of over 200 children who the Israeli military has killed since it resumed its bombing campaign in Gaza last week. In recent days, Nasser Hospital has experienced a major influx of patients, with hundreds arriving at the hospital as a result of the escalated assault. According to an Irish surgeon volunteering there, the average age of the children pronounced dead was between 6 and 8 years old, while over a third of all casualties there were children below 14 years old.
Just hours before the attack, Sidhwa and fellow American doctor Mark Perlmutter, of North Carolina, had given an interview on CNN — one of several with Western outlets the doctors have done in recent days. The doctors, who are both alive, strongly criticized Israel’s attacks and Western media for washing over the genocide.
“The carnage induced by our last five presidents, our largely Republican legislature, and the previous legislatures, and the whitewashing performed by the American and Western European legacy media is directly responsible for 100 percent of the 100,000 kids” believed to be killed in the genocide by some estimates, Perlmutter said.
“And if the media cannot acknowledge, for example, that [the 1948 Nakba] even happened … then you’re not either going to investigate or report on the babies that were buried alive in the mass grave that’s not even 100 yards from me,” he said. “The issue is that, when it’s a thunderstorm in Palestine since 1948, and Israel says it’s sunny outside, the American and Western media … says it’s an absolutely beautiful day.”
Perlmutter reportedly had his Instagram account suspended this week as he was posting about the atrocities he has witnessed in Gaza.
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