By Iftikhar Ali
UNITED NATIONS, May 29 (APP): An American trauma surgeon of Pakistani origin who volunteered at the European Hospital in the Gaza Strip earlier this year described the situation as a “rain of fire and death” during a UN Security Council briefing on the Middle East situation on Wednesday.
“During mass casualty events, we dealt with the rain of fire and death falling around us everywhere,” Dr. Feroze Sidhwa said, recounting the horrors he witnessed, particularly during the Israeli violation of a ceasefire on March 18.
Dr. Sidhwa, 41, was born in the United States of Pakistani parents who immigrated in 1982. He is the younger brother of Bapsi Sidhwa, the celebrated Pakistani novelist.
“That day (March 18), I witnessed the most extreme mass casualty event of my career. At Nasser Medical Complex, 221 trauma patients arrived in one morning. Ninety were dead on arrival, nearly half were severely injured children,” he said.
Noting that “no health system on earth could cope with this, least of all, one that is besieged and starved of supplies,” Dr. Sidhwa stressed that “hospitals are meant to be sanctuaries” but that protection no longer exists in Gaza.
For children who were shot in the head, he “personally treated 13 such cases” in two weeks at the European hospital. “Children ask, ‘Why didn’t I die with my sister, my mother, my father?’ Not out of extremism, but out of unbearable grief.”
Calling for decisive action, Sidhwa urged the Council to “demand an immediate and permanent cease-fire,” halt arms transfers, guarantee medical evacuations and ensure sustained humanitarian access.
“If this Council remains silent and fails to act now, that record will stand as a testament to a global failure to provide urgent care and to the collapse of our collective conscience,” he warned.
In his testimony, Dr. Sidhwa also said, “I did not see or treat a single combatant during my five weeks in Gaza — my patients were six-year-olds with shrapnel in their hearts and bullets in their brains, pregnant women whose pelvises were obliterated and fetuses cut in two while still in the womb.”
“I cannot pretend not to have seen it,” he said.
Underscoring that the medical system has not failed — “it has been systematically dismantled through a sustained military campaign that has willfully violated international humanitarian law” — he stressed that “preventing genocide means refusing to normalize these atrocities.” The War Child Alliance reports that “nearly half of Gaza’s children are suicidal”, he told Council members.
He urged them — “and especially my own (US) Government” — to demand an immediate ceasefire and a halt to all arms transfers. Further, it is necessary to “explicitly reject the weaponization and politicization of aid embodied by the ‘Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’”, he said, noting the public resignation of the Foundation’s executive director on 25 May due to the “lack of adherence to humanitarian principles”
Giving a first-hand account of Gaza’s collapsing healthcare system, drawing from his two medical missions to Khan Younis, Dr.Sidhwa said, “I am not here as a policymaker, but as a physician bearing witness to the deliberate destruction of healthcare, the targeting of my colleagues, and the erasure of a people.”
Surgeries performed on filthy floors without anesthesia and children dying from preventable causes due to Israel’s blockade of medical supplies, he said.
“This is not system failure – it has been systematically dismantled through violations of international law,” he emphasized, condemning the man-made famine now killing more civilians than bombs.
“Parents memorize their children’s clothing to identify remains,” he said, exposing the war’s psychological toll: nearly half of Gaza’s children are now suicidal, asking, “Why didn’t I die with my family?” Dr. Sidhwa implored the Council to enforce seven measures, including an arms embargo, calling their inaction “a testament to collapsed conscience” as Gaza’s last doctors and a generation of Palestinians face annihilation.
“You cannot claim ignorance,” Dr. Sidhwa added, “when children no longer want to live.”
In his speech, Pakistan’s UN Ambassador Asim Iftikhar Ahmad called Dr. Sidhwa’s testimony “sobering”, saying, “Those were harrowing details – unimaginable and so difficult to listen to and grasp.
“One would shudder to think how all those on ground – women and children, doctors, humanitarian workers, would be coping with that on a daily basis,” he told delegates.
“This is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made catastrophe, as we heard from both briefers today — driven by Israel, the occupying power’s unrelenting illegal blockade of Gaza, and all-out bombardment and deliberate killing, carried out with full impunity…”
“As Dr. Sidhwa said, we must now allow their atrocities to be normalized – for that would be an affront to international law and human dignity.”