'No toddler gets shot twice by mistake': US doctor shares horrific experience of Gaza

Two American doctors volunteering in Gaza have said they saw and treated multiple children with gunshot wounds to the head and heart, in the latest example of possible war crimes committed by the Israeli military in the nine-month long conflict.

Orthopaedic and hand surgeon Mark Perlmutter and trauma and care surgeon Feroze Sidhwa spent two weeks volunteering in a hospital in southern Gaza during April and May with a 12-person emergency medical team connected to the World Health Organization, formed of various medical professionals.

In a recent interview with American broadcaster CBS News, Perlmutter revealed how he almost exclusively tended to Palestinian children with injuries from gunshots, bomb shrapnel or crushes from collapsing buildings.

Speaking in public about their experiences, the doctors said they had never before witnessed human suffering on the scale of Gaza.

"Together, in our combined 57 years of volunteering, we’ve worked on more than 40 surgical missions in developing countries on four continents. We’re used to working in disaster and war zones, of being on intimate terms with death and carnage and despair.

"None of that prepared us for what we saw in Gaza this spring," Perlmutter and Sidhwa wrote in a first-person essay for US magazine Politico published on Friday.

They also testified to treating multiple children with gunshot wounds to the head or heart.

“One might argue that a children could have been injured unintentionally in an explosion.. gunshot wounds to the head are an entirely different matter,” they wrote.

The doctors said they were compelled to work in Gaza having spent years in various disaster and conflict zones around the world, adding that neither one of them has "any political interest in the outcome of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – other than wanting it to end".

They spent two weeks at the European Hospital in Khan Younis.

The hospital, they wrote, was vastly overcrowded as 1,500 people had been admitted to the 220-bed medical facility. “Rooms meant to hold four patients typically had 10 to 12,” they said, adding that 15,000 people were sheltering on the hospital grounds and inside the hallways, bathrooms and closets of the hospital.

The hospital was forced to evacuate in July after Israeli orders, forcing vulnerable patients and staff to exit and shutting down one of the enclave’s few medical centres.

“The intensive care units smelled like rot and death; the corridors stank like a kitchen filled with filth; the hospital grounds smelled of sewage and spent explosives. Only the operating rooms were relatively clean,” they wrote.

Israel’s multipronged assault on Gaza has seen the health system routinely attacked. Medical centres have come under siege and hundreds of doctors have been killed and arrested, while vital equipment has been blocked from coming into the besieged territory.

The World Health Organisation reported that only 15 hospitals in the territory are “partially functioning” and recent mass casualty attacks are overwhelming medical centres. There are reports of patients lying on the floor and doctors unable to properly treat patients amid a severe medicine shortage.

Perlmutter also shared his experience in Gaza on US television in an interview with CBS News.

Surgeon, Dr. Mark Perlmutter, on what he witnessed in his first month in Gaza. On @CBSSunday

“No toddler gets shot twice by mistake by the world’s best sniper.” pic.twitter.com/wAoRWaNngo

— Samira Mohyeddin سمیرا (@SMohyeddin) July 22, 2024

He again said he had never seen “the level of carnage” against civilians against his 30 years working in the field.

He said the civilian casualties were almost exclusively children, often with sniper bullet wounds.

“I have children that were shot twice,” he told CBS presenter Tracy Smith, who then asks him: “Wait you’re saying that children in Gaza are being shot by snipers?”

"Definitively," he responded.

"I have two children that I have photographs of that were shot so perfectly in the chest I couldn’t put my stethoscope over their heart more accurately, and directly on the side of the head in the same child. No toddler gets shot twice by mistake by 'the world’s best sniper. And they’re dead-centre shots."

The doctor’s testimony corroborates  numerous eyewitness accounts from Palestinians garnered over the course of the war who have said they saw neighbours and relatives shot in the street by Israeli snipers.

The accounts, however, sit at odds with the Israeli army’s claim to take steps "to mitigate the risk of harming civilians" and that operates within the confines of international law.

The war has killed some 39,000 Palestinians, 16,000 of them children, and wounded 90,000 more since October. As a result, Gaza is said to have the highest number of child amputees in the world.