A surgeon who operated on a boy recovering from Israeli airstrikes has recounted the devastating moment he found his young patient killed in his hospital bed after a bomb hit surgical wards in Gaza.
Feroze Sidhwa told The Independent of the destruction the bomb wrought on the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis on Sunday, describing the overpowering smell of smoke “like a barbecue” throughout the building and everyone being covered in soot, with the surgical ward completely destroyed, including windows blown out and rubble everywhere.
The attack came after Israel launched fresh waves of airstrikes as it resumed its war with Hamas last week, with Palestinian health authorities saying Israeli strikes have killed at least 65 people in the enclave in the past 24 hours – although officials do say Egypt has introduced a new proposal to try to get peace back on track.
Mr Sidhwa, who is working with the medical charity MedGlobal, said he was in the intensive care unit and was making his way over to the ward to change a patient’s dressing at the time of the attack.
The Californian surgeon said Nasser Hospital was put on lockdown for around an hour after the bombing, but he made his way down to the emergency room, where a patient who had been injured in the bombing was brought down wrapped in a blanket and placed on a stretcher by his family.
Speaking from the hospital on Monday, Mr Sidhwa told The Independent: “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.”
He described the 16-year-old as “young, healthy” and said he was set to go home on the day he was killed. “He was doing perfectly well, and to have him be killed literally in his hospital bed, it’s not normal at all,” said Mr Sidhwa.
The Israeli military said senior Hamas leader Ismail Barhoum, who was receiving treatment at Nasser Hospital, was killed in the strike.
The military said on Monday that Barhoum oversaw Hamas’s finances in Gaza and transferred funds to its military wing. It said he was also serving as the head of Hamas’s government in Gaza, having replaced another senior official who was killed in a strike last week.
Mr Sidhwa said most of the injured had been recovering from wounds suffered in airstrikes on Gaza last week, after Israel broke the fragile ceasefire with a surprise bombardment that killed hundreds. His 16-year-old patient and another man he had operated on in the days before Sunday’s bombing both died in the attack, he said.
Describing the aftermath of the airstrikes, the American trauma surgeon said: “The whole hospital smells like smoke. The whole second-floor male surgical ward has been destroyed, so the patients have been moved to another area. One we went around today smelt like a barbecue. Everyone’s covered in soot, the whole ward has been destroyed, all the electrical stuff is destroyed, the ceiling is destroyed, most of the windows are blown out, there’s rubble everywhere, some of the walls are destroyed. It’s what happens when you drop a bomb on a hospital.”
However, he added that the hospital has largely been able to continue functioning.
Nasser Hospital received seven bodies from strikes overnight and four from strikes the previous day. The European Hospital received three bodies from a strike near Khan Younis.
Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City received 11 bodies from strikes overnight into Monday, including those of three women and four children. One of the strikes killed two children, their parents, their grandmother and their uncle.
Officials say Egypt has introduced a new proposal to try to get the Israel-Hamas ceasefire back on track. Hamas would release five living hostages, including an American-Israeli, in return for Israel allowing humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip and a weeks-long pause in the fighting, an Egyptian official said on Monday. Israel would also release hundreds of Palestinian prisoners.
A Hamas official, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the closed-door nature of the talks, said the group had “responded positively” to the proposal, but did not elaborate.
Gaza’s health ministry said on Sunday that the Palestinian death toll from the 17-month war had passed 50,000. It has said that women and children make up more than half the dead, but does not distinguish between civilians and combatants in its count. Israel says it has killed some 20,000 militants, without providing evidence.
Hamas-led militants killed around 1,200 people, mainly civilians, and abducted 251 people in the 7 October 2023 attack that ignited the war.
