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Sidhwa admits he declared the two girls dead early. Given the conditions at the hospital, there was no chance to save them. "They both just had terrible brain injuries. ... So I had to just tell their families, I just had to pick them up and say, 'You know, they're going to die, there's nothing I can do about that.'" Sidhwa says the hospital staff set up this area "because they have a lot of experience and they knew that this scenario would happen." Priority must go to those who might survive.
Summary (See link for full testimony) “”Dead children area””: American surgeons return from Gaza and can’t forget the nightmare.
The Haaretz article reports on two American doctors, Mark Perlmutter and Feroze Sidhwa, who returned from a volunteer mission in hospitals in the Gaza Strip. They describe extreme overcrowding, difficult working conditions, and severe shortages of medical supplies and medications.
One of the central issues highlighted in their testimony is the establishment of designated areas in hospitals for severely injured children who could not realistically be saved due to lack of resources. In these areas, children were placed without life-saving treatment, while their families came to see them in their final state.
The doctors recount wards filled far beyond capacity, large numbers of wounded patients waiting without immediate treatment, and medical staff working continuously under extreme pressure. Often, doctors were forced to decide who would receive life-saving care and who would receive only supportive treatment, given the shortages.
Their accounts emphasize the gap between the medical standards they are familiar with and the reality inside the Gaza Strip: working with partial equipment, dealing with complex injuries, and a health system operating far beyond its absorption capacity. They note that this situation is not temporary but ongoing, with hospitals functioning under conditions that prevent them from providing adequate medical care to all those in need.
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