The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Marc Steiner:

Hello, I’m Marc Steiner. Welcome to the Mark Steiner Show here on The Real News. It’s good to have you all with us. And as you know, we’ve been covering Gaza and what’s been happening in is Israel Palestine for a long time now with some intensity. And what we’re about to talk about today is probably one of the more intense experiences that anybody could have in terms of living it, but also just uncovering it from a distance what is actually taking place in Gaza. And we’re talking today with Dr. Farro Sidwell. He’s a trauma surgeon who has worked across the globe in tragedies as a physician. He works at the San Joaquin General Hospital in Stockton, California, and he volunteered in Gaza. And what he wrote, he wrote an article for Politico, what he’s seen, what he’s talking about shares a light that people do not know about that they need to hear. They need to understand the depth of depravity taking place inside of Gaia at this moment. And first, let me start by just saying, welcome, Dr. Sid, what’s good to have you with us.

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa:

Thanks. Thanks for having me.

Marc Steiner:

It’s almost hard. I’m going to read a little bit about what you wrote here in about 30 seconds, but it’s almost hard to comprehend the level of violence and depravity that’s taking place in Gaza that you’ve experienced and you’re still living with.

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa:

I mean, it is a lot. Yeah, thankfully I’ve been fine since I’ve gotten back. I haven’t had any major trauma responses, ptsd, D kind symptoms or things like that, but almost everybody else that’s come back has, and I mean, we don’t want to paint ourselves as victims. We’re not the victims in the situation. We chose to go there and then we leave. But our colleagues there. On the other hand, our healthcare colleagues, especially the surgeons and the surgical nurses are, I don’t know how if this craziness ever ends and if they survive, I can’t imagine how they rebuild their lives and go back to some, anything that’s less is more normal than this. I just don’t know how they’ll do it.

Marc Steiner:

But I mean, I can’t understand how people actually, how the godland survive and how people, as you live through it. Lemme just read a little bit about, you wrote in your political for people understand and we’ll take off from there. He wrote, we first noticed the overcrowding, 1500 people admitted to a 220 bed hospital rooms meant for four patients. At 10 to 12 people. Patients were housed in every space, radiology department, common areas everywhere. Next we noticed the 15,000 people sheltering on the hospital grounds and inside the hospital lining, even blockading the hallways throughout the wards in the bathrooms and closets on the stairs, even in the sterile processing and food preparation facilities and operating rooms themselves. The hospital was a displaced person’s camp. Then there were the odors, the intensive care units smelled like rot and death. The Carter Staed, like a kitchen filled with filth, the hospital ground smelled of sewage and spent explosives. Only the operating rooms were relatively clean. It’s what we imagine the first weeks of a zombie apocalypse would look and smell like.

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa:

And just to be clear, that was last year.

Marc Steiner:

That was last year. Lemme just start with a very personal note here. Talk a bit about what, I mean, you’ve been in many war zones, you’ve served across the globe in all kinds of horrendous situations, but my sense from what you’ve written, my sense of what you’ve described, that you’ve almost never seen anything like the trauma that you saw in Gaza.

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa:

Yeah, Gaza is very different than anywhere else that I’ve worked when I’ve been in Ukraine. The Ukrainian, the war in Ukraine is extremely brutal. Nobody should think otherwise, but it’s a war. It’s a very nasty, very brutal fight going on between two armies. Obviously civilians get hurt, obviously civilians are even targeted. Civilian infrastructure is targeted. Hospitals act actually have been targeted hospitals and medical personnel in Ukraine, actually before October 7th, Ukraine was the worst country in the world in terms of attacks on healthcare by militaries. But it just doesn’t hold a candle to what’s going on in Gaza. Just to give you an example, if you adjust for the size of the population, because Ukraine has 40 million people and Gaza has 2 million, the rate of killing of healthcare workers in Gaza is 110 times higher than it is in Ukraine. The three orders of magnitude is completely crazy, or sorry, two orders of magnitude.

It’s just completely nuts. It’s in Gaza. It’s not that a hospital has been bombed or a doctor got killed or a nurse got killed. It’s that literally the entire healthcare system has been destroyed. Imagine the city that you live in or the region that you live in. Every hospital being laid siege to systematically and just laid waste over and over and over and over again. They’re right now, and not just the hospital, but the personnel as well. Right now, the net supreme corridor is the one that cuts Gaza in half from north to south. Every single hospital director north of the net, supreme corridor is dead or in an Israeli prison right now. That’s nuts. I mean, when has that happened to anywhere else on earth? These kinds of, there’s nothing that remotely approaches the attack on, forget everything else. Just the healthcare system actually is Israel’s major human rights group and physicians for human rights, Israel, their two very good Israeli human rights groups. They just wrote a report that came out maybe yesterday or the day before. Now I can’t remember concluding that what Israel is doing in Gaza is actually genocidal. So kind of joining the conclusions,

Marc Steiner:

I read that this morning,

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa:

Watch Amnesty International, but what they actually write is that even leaving aside everything else, just the attack on the healthcare system probably would’ve, could probably meet the criteria for genocide. Leaving aside that the destruction of literally everything else in the society, they said just the attack on healthcare could very easily have met the criteria for the crime of genocide. That is pretty wild. I mean, that’s pretty extreme. I can’t think of another conflict where if you had removed the rest of the conflict, just the attack on healthcare would’ve constituted genocide. I mean, that’s pretty extreme, and again, that’s leaving aside that all the rest of this stuff is also happening. So yeah, no mean Gaza, it is an incredibly overwhelming place to work. There’s no doubt about that. But you just more so than it’d be being overwhelming for me at least, the issue is that I know that we are responsible for it. I’m assuming you’re an American also, I’ll tell you on March 18th of this year, I was at Nassar Medical Complex. What you read off was when I was at European the year before and on March 18th, that’s when the widespread bombing of Gaza resumed when the Israelis

Marc Steiner:

Broke and you were there a

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa:

Ceasefire. And so the first person that I found that day that could actually live was a five-year-old girl. Her name turned out to be sham. She had a wound to her face right here and shrapnel that had traveled through her brain, and then she had an injury to her lung and her spleen, and so she wasn’t breathing properly when I found her. So I just jaw thrusted her, like I pulled her jaw forward a little bit so she could breathe and she did. So since she breathed, I knew that the injury to her brain hadn’t destroyed her brain, at least not yet. So I said she could potentially live, so let’s work on here. So I’m just holding her jaw open so she can start breathing properly while the nurses got some stuff set up and there’s just this little trickle of blood coming out of her cheek, and I remember thinking, did I pay for the shrapnel that’s in this girl’s head, or did my neighbor or did my other neighbor, one of us, somebody in this country paid for it. And that’s the kind of thing that really changed it a little bit because you go to Ukraine. Yeah, we have a lot of responsibility for what’s going on in Ukraine. No question about that, but it’s just for some reason it’s different. It’s not an attack directly on a civilian population that we are funding. Yeah,

Marc Steiner:

I mean the difference is what you’re describing, what you’re experiencing in Ukraine, other places are in the midst of a war. It’s not a slaughter of innocence and civilians.

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa:

Yeah, I mean it’s very hard to look at the war in Gaza either from inside, I’ve seen it pretty closely or outside and can include that it’s a war on Hamas. That’s not really what you see, and it’s when people study the war and report on it, that’s not what they find either. It like you just said, and I think you’re right, it seems to be a war on the civilian population and people have to remember that the civilians are, half of Gaza is literally half of Gaza’s children. It’s one of the youngest places in the world. It was already one of the most deprived and densely populated and miserable places in the world before October of 2023. But now it’s barely part of earth. I mean it’s wild.

Marc Steiner:

And one of the things the Israeli government has been saying is that Hamas and the fighters are hiding and fighting from inside the hospitals, and you clearly debunk that. You saw no evidence of that taking place in Gaza.

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa:

Yeah. Well, it’s important to remember, not just me. You’re correct. I never saw, the only time I ever saw combatant even on the grounds of the hospital in Gaza was during the ceasefire. I got there on March 6th and the ceasefire was broken on March 18th, so it was probably March 7th or eighth. I literally saw some guys in a pickup truck with the typical Hamas garb on the vest and the bandana, and they had rifles and stuff.

Marc Steiner:

They

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa:

Literally drove into the hospital courtyard and almost as if they’d made a wrong turn, they just drove through the courtyard and went out. They were on the hospital grounds for like eight seconds or something. But yeah, no, that’s correct. The Israelis claim repeatedly and just, it’s ridiculous at this point that Hamas is operating out of the hospitals of Gazen. It just as far as anybody can tell, it’s not true. And it’s not just me that never saw anybody in a hospital in Gaza, me and 99 other American healthcare workers, or 99 total American healthcare workers who’ve worked in Gaza since October of 2023. We all wrote a signed letter to the Biden administration in what October of last year, saying that none of us have ever seen anything that could even approach the concept of militarization of a hospital in Gaza. Mods Gilbert, who worked at Schiff, a hospital for I think 30 years.

He’s a European anesthesiologist and emergency doctor. He wrote that, and he is repeatedly said he’s never seen any kind of military activity at Schiff Shiffa Hospital. The Israelis Shiffa is kind of a good example. They rated Shiffa Hospital four times the fourth time completely destroying it, and at the beginning, and people might, if you have a longer memory, you might remember this kind of bizarre resident evil video game simulation that they had created in A CGI computer to show what the Hamas complex looks like underneath Shiffa Hospital. Now, of course, when they rated the hospital repeatedly, it didn’t exist. So then in the last time they rated it, there was an Associated Press report. I’ll just never forget it because that raid ended while I was in Gaza at European Hospital the first time, the Associated Press, I’m pretty sure the reporter did this whole report just so we could get this one line on the record.

He asked the Israeli spokesperson, because they destroyed the entire hospital complex. If anybody just Google, Google Image Shifa Hospital, S-H-I-F-A, and you’ll be shocked by what was done to this place. It was a huge hospital. It was 750 beds that would make it the seventh biggest hospital in California. It was a massive place, and it’s just completely gone. It’s completely erected. And so finally the AP reporter asked, why did you go in and have to destroy the hospital? You said they were operating out of a tunnel complex under the hospital, and the Israeli spokesperson just says, oh yeah, we were wrong about that. Turns out they were in the hospital the whole time. Then why doesn’t anyone see them there? What are you talking about? The whole thing is ridiculous to the point of farce at this point. It’s just idiotic

Marc Steiner:

In the time we have together here. I really want to kind of a couple of things. I want to come back to the larger political question that you’re also involved in, but some of the stories that you’ve written about and other people have written about in Gaza are mind numbing. They’re just hard to deal with. I mean, I lived through the trauma of the Civil Rights Movement mean all kinds of stuff when we were arrested and things that happened in Mississippi and Alabama when I was young, but nothing compares to what I’ve been reading about Gaza. I have friends who lived through the Vietnam War and were treating people in Vietnam. What you’re seeing here is beyond almost comprehension, as you wrote about as your words, I think were zombie-like a dystopian nightmare. So give us a sense of that. I want people to really understand what you went through and what Goins are going through at this very moment.

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa:

Yeah, I mean, what matters is what the Gaza people are going through right now.

Marc Steiner:

Yes, I got

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa:

You. And they’re going through something that’s pretty hard to describe honestly. I mean, no significant amount of food has been led into Gaza since March 2nd of this year. But prior to that, Israel had also conducted starvation, long prolonged starvation campaigns, especially in Northern Gaza where access had been cut off probably by November or December of 2023. But nevertheless, one, there aren’t many saving graces of the Biden administration in this story, but one of them is that they did repeatedly force the Israelis to allow food and other aid into Gaza at least so that people wouldn’t starve in large numbers. I strongly suspect that people have actually starved in large numbers, but it was mostly off camera because if people remember there was a spate of starvation deaths amongst children, but this was last year, maybe at the beginning of the year. But those were mostly in children who already had some kind of preexisting illness.

They were born with cystic fibrosis or something like that, which doesn’t mean they should starve the death, obviously, but it just means they’re much more vulnerable than other people. But now starvation is happening just in normal teenagers. That’s extremely just thinking. Anybody who has a teenage kid, you could let them loose anywhere, and when they get hungry enough, they’re going to eat anything they can find and they’re not going to starve to death. This is completely unusual, usual, the whole, it’s commonly depending on which WHO bulletin or whatever you read, they say Gaza has 36 or 38 hospitals in it, but that’s totally incorrect, which constituted about 60% of all the advanced healthcare in Gaza and about 60% the beds Shifa doesn’t exist anymore. For all intents and purposes. Now, it’s like an urgent care center, and there’s one operating room that I’m told has been set up in a dentist’s office.

Marc Steiner:

Oh my

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa:

God, this is ridiculous. Kamala LA one hospital was always less than a hundred bed hospital. It’s very, very small. It’s out of service. Indonesian hospital, I believe is less than a hundred beds as well. It’s also out of service. So right now, there really is no hospital in northern Gaza. Alsa Martyrs Hospital in Dear Alah will soon be surrounded by Israeli troops. I believe it’s less than a kilometer from the Israeli front in Daral Bah, European hospital on the eastern side of Kunis is empty and so deep in the evacuation zone that there’s, I can’t imagine anyone else will ever go back to it unless the war, the attack ends and Nassar medical complex where I worked is also completely surrounded by an evacuation zone. People can get in and out to do. So they’re under pain of death because on the Israeli maps, the whole area around Nassar is red, meaning it’s a closed combat area, but people have still been able to access the hospital in a practical sense.

They’ve still been able to walk towards it at least and get in. Who knows how many people have died trying. Nobody has any idea, but the people who get to the front door can still access some healthcare. But those are the only things that you or I would recognize as a hospital in Gaza. Otherwise, there’s rehabilitation centers or there’s a cancer hospital, but these aren’t places where you can treat huge numbers of trauma patients, which is what’s going on currently. The Ministry of Health numbers that are often cited in that are usually the source of death counts in the media. There’s one in soon to be two studies in the medical literature. So like scientific professionally done studies showing that those are an under count of about 40% at least. I’m pretty sure those are actually still major under counts, but nevertheless, that’s what the literature shows right now. So something like a hundred thousand people have died just from violence in Gaza. Gaza is only a place of 2 million people. It’s not a big place. So you’re talking about a very substantial portion of the population that means somewhere between 20 and 40,000 children have been killed in Gaza in the past

Year in what, eight months or something? Just to put that in context, because it’s an awful thing to say, but how many children is too many children in a war? I mean, obviously children died when we bombed Nazi Germany. Children died when we bombed Japan in World War ii. So it’s not like children, it’s an awful thing to say, but it’s not like children are never supposed to die in a war. But just think about this for a second. Even going just by the official numbers, the people whose names birthdays, ID numbers, we know they’re published, and like I said, the medical literature finds that the Ministry of Health is undercounting by 40%, but just take the Ministry of Health’s list, more children under the age of two. So two and under have been killed in Gaza since October 7th than every Israeli who has ever died from military or terrorist violence. Whoa, ever.

Marc Steiner:

You’re talkings insane. The Israeli population. That’s completely nuts. Adult and children, everybody.

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa:

Yes. No, that’s what I’m saying. Adults, children, everyone who’s ever been killed by military weaponry or by a terrorist in Israel’s entire existence, that’s insane. I mean, these numbers are crazy. If you look at it. Just to give people one other example. So Air Wars is a British research firm that looks at the impact of modern Air Force campaigns against on civilians. So they studied the first 24 days of the Israeli attack on Gaza, October 7th to 31st of 2023, and they found that 1,900 children were killed in. There were no ground attacks at that time. What they found is 1900 identifiable children. So there are probably more, but they could identify 1900 children who were killed in Gaza in those 24 days. And so again, is that too many? Is that who knows? If you look at the deadliest year of conflict that they’ve ever covered, which was Syria in 2016, the same number of children were killed 1,923, if I remember right. So the deadliest year in conflict, they’ve ever studied Syria in 2016 versus 20 something days in the Gaza Strip. It is just these comparisons are insane. I mean, there’s just no way to make this make any sense. Other than that it is a war on the civilian population using the combined might of the US and Israeli militaries, and it’s having exactly the effect you would expect it to.

Marc Steiner:

I want to ask two questions here before we have to go, because I know your time is limited as well. What are the impacts, the profound impacts on the population of Gaza? Psychological, physical, the starvation taking place? I mean, the long-term effects of this, I think people don’t really realize it’s not just, if we could end the war now, we could stop this massive slaughter of Palestinian people in. It would not end the trauma that people face in Gaza.

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa:

Yeah, no, not at all, actually. And that’s a really good point. I’ll tell you a story. I guess when I was at Nasser, this is probably like, I dunno, March 15th or 16th of this year, I met a cardiologist and he lived in Rafa, which still existed at the time, the city on the very southern.

Marc Steiner:

He was Palestinian,

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa:

Yeah, yeah. A Palestinian cardiologist who lived and lived in Rafa, and Rafa is the southern or was the southern most city in Gaza. It’s literally been completely obliterated. But he told me this story that had happened the night before, so it was just fresh on his mind. There are gun towers in the Philadelphia corridor, the very southern edge of Gaza, and his apartment block faces south. So he and his family were in their apartment and gunfire came into the apartment. So of course, the whole family, it was him, his wife, and I think three children who are eight or above, but they all hit the deck real fast. But he also has a four-year-old daughter. So if you think about it, her only memories are of this so slaughter, right?

Marc Steiner:

Right.

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa:

So this 4-year-old girl just keeps dancing in a circle and singing to herself, just entertaining herself like she was before. Bullets were flying into their home, and mom and dad said, sweetie, what are you doing? Come over here. You’re going to get hurt. And she said, no, mommy, don’t worry. The bullets are all the way up there. See, look where they’re, so they had to bear crawl over to her and tackle her.

This child is so used to hearing gunfire that she is walking into it like kids walk into traffic. It is just crazy. This is what is being done to the children of Gaza. It is absolutely devastating. But then you’re a hundred percent correct about the long-term impact of starvation on even the children that survive. They are going to have serious problems. You can’t deprive a child of adequate nutritional intake for two years and expect them to develop normally. They’re not going to, their brain’s not going to be normal. They’re not going to have a normal iq. They’re not going to have a normal emotional intelligence. Their growth will be stunted. They’re basically never going to have a normal life. But also beyond that, if you think of any culture, which is a lot of them that have gone through periods of extreme food deprivation, famine, that becomes a very central part of the culture. You can think of anybody who’s ever talked to a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, they’ll mention the violence, but the thing they’ll say over is the hunger, hunger, hunger.

Marc Steiner:

I grew up with those people.

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa:

What I remember just gnawing, where is food? Where is food? Where is food? The same thing about survivors of the death cams, the same thing. Survivors of the Irish potato famine. This just goes on and on. This is certainly going to be a central feature of the culture of Palestinians in Gaza, and it’s again, if the Palestinians of Gaza still exist next year, but it is going to have a profound effect even on those who manage to live. And right now want to say, I don’t know how many that’s going to be.

Marc Steiner:

I’m very interested in your thoughts about the international criminality of what’s happening and what should occur. And I know that one of your partners going over, and I think this is important to say because a lot of the doctors who went and the man you went with was Jewish,

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa:

Mark here

Marc Steiner:

To Gaza. And I think that’s really important for people to know and

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa:

Understand

Marc Steiner:

That there are a lot of us in the Jewish world saying, no, not in our name.

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa:

Yeah. I just got back from four days of talks in Madison with Jewish voice for peace. Yeah, absolutely.

Marc Steiner:

Were you as a physician, as a trauma physician, what you would say to, and how do you think that should be handled in terms of international law? What Israel’s doing in terms of creating this genocidal slaughter? What should happen? What are you advocating?

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa:

Yeah, I would just reframe the question a little bit. Please do. I don’t think we meaning Americans, I don’t think we should seek to impose international law on Israel. I think we should seek to impose it on ourselves, or we could forget international law, just our own laws. And we all know, we’ve all heard in the media over and over and over again, there’s a dozen laws that were breaking by continuing to send arms to Israel. Even Patrick Leahy, the guy who wrote the Lehe law of retired senator in Vermont, now, he wrote in the Washington Post, I think last year, that the Lehey law is just not applied when it comes to arms trans through Israel. The way that’s put in the media is the Lehey law is not applied to Israel, but that’s wrong. We are breaking the Lehey law. That’s what it’s, Israel can’t break the Lahey law. It’s an American law. We are breaking it by sending them the arms. There is no Israeli attack on Gaza going on. There’s a US Israeli attack going on. Israeli pilots are flying American airplanes with American jet fuel, with American maintenance, with American spare parts, dropping American bombs with guided targets that are using American targeting systems. That’s literally what’s happening. It’s completely nuts. The D nine bulldozers that they’re using to destroy everything come from Indiana, if I’m remembering correctly.

Marc Steiner:

That’s right.

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa:

Everything that’s being done is from us, and that’s why we should care. We shouldn’t care because it’s Israel doing it. We should care because it’s us doing it and you’re Jewish, so it’s different for you because it’s done in your name. So I can understand the focus on Israel, but for me, I’m just an American guy. My family is from a small ethnic and religious minority in Pakistan. I don’t have any ethnic or religious tie to the conflict or the Middle East at all. For me, it’s just I’m an American and I don’t want my money. I don’t want the prestige and power of my government. I don’t want my own conscience involved. Like I said, when I was dealing with Sham, I was sitting there wondering who paid for the shrapnel that’s in this girl’s head? I mean, I paid for what, 1000000000th of 1 cent of it or something.

And that’s wrong. It’s just the wrong thing to do. We shouldn’t be doing that. On top of that, it just so happens that if we stopped doing it, it would have tremendously positive impacts on the world. Israel would be better off, the Palestinians would be better off. Jews in general would be better off. Humans in general would be better off. No one except for Benjamin Netanyahu, IMR Vir, trich and the other lunatics that are in the cabinet, and the people who want to push Israel further and further and further and further to the right to turn it into some kind of even crazier dystopian loony house than it already is. Those are the only people that are benefiting from this. The US is just pouring fuel on the fire of what has been very widely described. And I don’t take any pleasure in saying this, but what has been widely described as an attempt to impose Jewish supremacy? Like you mentioned that you dealt with the Civil Rights movement, white supremacy in the US Jewish supremacy over there, and you saw pretty much the same effects there. I mean, here it was manifested in things like lynchings and KKK rates and things like that. There. It’s being manifested this way because we are just pouring fuel onto the fire. Imagine what Southern White racists would’ve done if they had access to the full military might of the United States. Air Force

Probably would’ve done what Israel’s doing right now, and in fact they did in the famous Tulsa raid. But just this is kicked up to a million because of the level of technology and the amount of money that’s being used and the fact that it’s a state doing it, not a small group of people. So, so I think we should look at ourselves, and I think we should just look in the mirror and say, this is not something that we ought to be involved in. If we’re Americans of literally any stripe, secular Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, whoever you can think of, I don’t think Americans want our tax dollars being used to blow children up, to kill pregnant women and rip the babies out of their wombs to starve pregnant women and children and perfectly innocent men too. I don’t see why we shouldn’t mention them and to destroy literally an entire society. I mean, 70% of structures in the Gaza Strip human built things have been destroyed. 70%. That didn’t happen with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

This is insane. We’re just leveling a whole society for the sake of doing it. And Israeli ministers are perfectly open about why they’re doing it. Nobody hides what they’re doing. They don’t make any pretense because they’re trying to feed the kind of blood lust that’s going on in their wing of Israeli society. And furthermore, Israeli peaceniks are horrified by it. Not just Peaceniks, but kind of anyone left of Netanyahu is getting to be horrified by it. So I don’t think that by empowering the worst aspects of Israeli society, we’re helping them. I don’t think we’re violating our own laws for our own benefit. I don’t think we’re violating them for Israel’s benefit. We’re certainly not violating them for the Palestinians benefit. And on top of that, it’s kind of crazy if you think about it, if you look at polls something like 80 or 85% of Americans don’t want to be sending arms to Israel.

Now, some of that’s for pretty ugly reasons, nativist reasons. Some small percentage of them are probably true antisemites. But nevertheless, we live in a country where 85% of people want to stop being involved in what’s called the crime of crimes genocide. And we’re still doing it anyway, that tells you something about us. You again can talk about the Israelis all we want, but it tells you something about us. We don’t have a democratic system, and we should. The fight for Gaza is a fight for us. That’s what I tell people, and that’s why I think we should apply our own laws to ourselves, what people who aren’t hypocrites do.

Marc Steiner:

But Dr. Tho, I want to thank you for your bravery in the face of the destruction of Gaza and being there in the midst of it all. Thank you for joining us today. You and your fellow physicians and healthcare workers who went to Gaza, literally put your lives on the line, trying to save lives, and in the midst of this massive destruction. And what you’re saying now politically is really important for people to hear, but we have to stop in this country to stop that from going on.

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa:

Yeah, it’s all up to us.

Marc Steiner:

It’s all up to us. It’s so important. It is up to us. And I just want to thank you so much for all of that, and thank you for joining us today. I look forward to staying in touch and whatever I can do to march down the road with you, I’m there. So thank you so much for being with us.

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa:

Thanks, Marc. See you soon. Soon.

Marc Steiner:

Once again, I want to thank Dr. Farro Swa for joining us today and for the work he does in Gaza and as a traumatic surgeon across the globe. And thanks to Kevin Grino for running the program, and Stephen Frank and David Hebdon for editing today’s podcast, Roset Ali, for producing the March Designer Show and bringing these guests to us and the tireless Kayla Avara for making it all work behind the scenes. And everyone here through news for making this show possible. Please let me know what you thought about, what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com and I’ll get right back to you. And once again, thank you to Dr. Perot Swa for being our guest today. And we’ll be linking to his article on Politico and his other work, the understand the depth that he’s undertaken in this world. We must end the war in Gaza. So for the World News, I’m Marc Steiner. Take care and keep listening.