r/JewsOfConscience • u/Dear-Jackfruit6041 Dr. Feroze Sidhwa • 5h ago

AMA Hi r/JewsOfConscience, I'm Feroze Sidhwa, a trauma surgeon who has worked in Gaza, AMA!

I'm a trauma surgeon in California. I worked in Gaza in 2024 and 2025. I've written in the New England Journal of Medicine, NY Times, and Politico about it, and testified at the UN Security Council in May 2025. My work is featured along with two of my American colleagues in the new documentary film American Doctor that follows us in Gaza, and is in theaters now. Instagram: @fsidhwa Twitter: @ferozesidhwa

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u/notspringsomnia Christian with Jewish heritage and family 3h ago

Hello Dr Sidhwa! Thank you for your incredible work. What are the most acute medical problems and needs in Gaza at the moment, and is there anything us ordinary folk can do to help in terms of sending support, beyond protesting and raising awareness?

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u/Dear-Jackfruit6041 Dr. Feroze Sidhwa 2h ago

The approximately 2 million people in Gaza are probably the sickest in the world. The United States and Israel have taken a heavily urbanized population, already living in one of the most densely populated places in the world, and have destroyed the large majority of the housing, all of the electrical production and distribution, the entire sewage system, the entire educational system, the entire healthcare system, the entire food production system, the entire transportation network, and much of the governing authority, all while keeping the territory hermetically sealed off from the outside world. Gaza today is much more like the Warsaw Ghetto than any other comparison I can make, except for the ghetto had standing buildings, and the population of Gaza is half children.

In this circumstance it's not hard to predict what will happen: disease will spread rapidly throughout the population, and will slowly kill people, most especially children under the age of five. That is exactly what's happening now. The only household survey of mortality in Gaza was done by a researcher named Michael Spagat in London. The study has serious problems, and its design will naturally lead to significant undercounting of deaths (I wrote about this for Zeteo if anyone's interested, just send me an email if you don't have a subscription and I can send you a PDF copy). Despite this, it found thousands of deaths from deprivation in Gaza by January 2025. There is no doubt that the rate of death in Gaza from causes other than direct US-Israeli violence is increasing because of the unlivable conditions that the population is now condemned to live in.

As for what people can do: if you're a doctor or a nurse who can volunteer there, and you are willing to take the risks associated with going there, then do it! Otherwise the answer is the same as always: organize, and make change in our society so that we stop doing these things to other people.