AN American surgeon volunteer at a Gaza hospital has condemned the Israeli regime’s heavy toll on Palestinian medical facilities since October 7th, 2023, asserting that it is ‘deliberately’ destroying the health-care infrastructure in the besieged territory.
Dr Feroze Sidhwa, who is a trauma, critical care and acute care surgeon based in California, made the comment in a TV programme while on his second volunteer trip to Gaza where he is working at the Nasser Medical Complex in the southern Gaza Strip city of Khan Younis.
He stressed that Tel Aviv has, over the past 17 months, repeatedly targeted hospitals and committed mass atrocities against Palestinian patients and those seeking refuge in medical facilities – which are protected under international law.
Pointing to the Western and European disregard for Israel’s unrestrained bombing of hospitals in the Gaza Strip, Dr Sidhwa said: ‘You are not allowed to just say the simple and obvious truth.’
‘The Israelis are deliberately destroying the health-care system with the backing of the United States and Europe… anybody with half a brain can figure it out but you are not allowed to say it.’
The American surgeon censured the United States administration for providing military, intelligence and financial assistance to Tel Aviv in perpetrating atrocities in the besieged Palestinian territory.
‘When I go back to the United States, I can tell people about the professional work I did and which I do, but I also want people to understand that we are committing crimes in Gaza,’ he said.
He pointed out that people say America is complicit in these crimes, but this is not the case. ‘That implies that Israel is committing the crime and we are in the background or something.
‘The US and Israel are committing crimes in Gaza together.
‘It’s American airplanes, it’s American helicopters, it’s American bombs, even the tanks, these Merkava tanks were made in the United States.
‘I do not accept that my government has to be involved in committing crimes against people who have done us no harm.’
During the interview, Sidhwa also touched on the Israeli regime’s repeated violation of the ceasefire that took effect in mid-January and its onslaught on Gaza hospitals, most of which are not functioning due to the regime’s relentless bombardment.
‘Gaza still has no normal connection to the outside world even during the ceasefire,’ he said.
‘The Israelis never allowed in the tents that they were supposed to allow during the ceasefire, they never allowed in the mobile homes that they were supposed to allow during the ceasefire, they never allowed the proper number of aid trucks in… and they never allowed for the evacuation of wounded people and they also restricted the entry of foreign medical personnel.’
The Israeli regime was forced to agree to a ceasefire deal with Hamas in January, given the illegal entity’s failure to achieve any of its objectives, including the ‘elimination’ of the Palestinian resistance movement or the release of captives.
The 42-day first stage of the truce, which was marred by repeated Israeli violations, expired on March 1st, but Israel is refraining from stepping into talks for the second stage of the agreement.
Israel launched the campaign of genocide in Gaza on October 7th, 2023.
The regime has massacred over 50,200 Palestinians and injured at least 114,000 others since, according to the Gaza health ministry.
Meanwhile, the Yemeni army says it has successfully targeted Ben Gurion Airport in the Israeli-occupied region of Yafa in support of the oppressed people of Palestine, just hours after targeting an American aircraft carrier in the Red Sea.
In a statement on Sunday, the Yemeni Armed Forces said it used the Zulfiqar ballistic missile in the operation, which ‘successfully achieved its objective’.
Earlier in the day, the Israeli military claimed that the missile was shot down before it crossed the occupied territories’ borders.
Sirens had reportedly sounded across the central occupied territories, in several towns near Jerusalem, and some West Bank settlements.
‘Through this operation, the Yemeni Armed Forces confirm the failure of the American aggression to prevent Yemen from continuing its support operations for the oppressed Palestinian people,’ the Yemeni Armed Forces said.
‘The dozens of daily raids will not deter the Armed Forces from fulfilling their religious, moral, and humanitarian duties,’ it said, adding that the Yemeni fighters will continue their operations against the Israeli enemy until the aggression against Gaza stops and the siege is lifted.
On Sunday morning, Brigadier General Yahya Saree, spokesperson for Yemen’s military, said the country’s armed forces had three military confrontations with US vessels, including the USS Harry S. Truman, over the past 24 hours.
These retaliatory operations involved Yemen’s missile force, the air force’s drone unit, and the naval force, and were conducted with multiple domestically-developed cruise missiles and combat drones.
Yemenis have been hitting Israeli and American targets in support of Palestinians in Gaza since the regime launched its devastating war on Gaza on October 7th, 2023, and in response to the American-British aggression on their own homeland.
The operations have effectively shut down the Eilat port in the south of the occupied territories, causing significant economic setbacks for the Israelis.
The Yemeni Armed Forces have said they will not stop their attacks until Israel’s ground and aerial offensives in Gaza end.
- A recent investigation has uncovered a trend by the US Immigration Agency to discreetly revoke the immigration status of university students without their, or their educational institutions’, knowledge.
Zeteo, a US-based media organisation founded by British-American journalist Mehdi Hasan, reported on Sunday that the students targeted are from the Middle East and Muslim-majority countries.
They’ve also reported inconsistent notification patterns: some students have been informed about the revocations by the government, some have not; some only found out after officials manually checked internal visa status databases, while universities and officials themselves have mostly seemed to not be informed by the government.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) appears to be manually revoking students’ immigration status – an authority typically left to university staff.
And some students and universities are not even being made aware of those revocations, setting students up to be taken by immigration agents and deported without even knowing it was coming.
‘Never seen anything like this,’ Zeteo quoted university officials as saying.
In the past week, the Trump administration has been tightening the noose on pro-Palestinian activists.
Zeteo said it appears it is quietly targeting even more students for deportation and doing so in a way that is taking universities and the students themselves completely by surprise.
Samah Sisay, a legal expert from the Center for Constitutional Rights, told Zeteo that one’s visa being revoked does not mean that their status would be too.
Unlike student visas, which are entry documents that allow someone to enter the country, student statuses allow people to stay in the United States. To maintain one’s status, a student has to fulfil certain requirements, like being properly enrolled in classes, keeping documents up to date, and following work restrictions.
The attorney said a student’s visa could expire or be revoked for any number of reasons, but that wouldn’t necessarily mean their status to stay would be taken away, too.
Some of these statuses, which are typically overseen by university officers, are now allegedly being unilaterally revoked by ICE instead.
While university officers often oversee status in the SEVIS system, Sisay said that the US Department of Homeland Security can technically revoke status without a university actively disenrolling a student.
