FEROZE SIDHWA, feroze.sidhwa@gmail.
Dr. Sidhwa, a general and trauma surgeon in California, was blocked from entering Gaza by Israel on Thursday Nov. 13. He is available for a limited number of interviews. The rest of his team, with the American NGO MedGlobal, was allowed in. He is currently appealing the denial of entry. This would have been his third humanitarian deployment to the Gaza Strip in the past two years. He was approved by COGAT, the Israeli military’s humanitarian liaison office, three months ago, but this approval was withdrawn six hours before the planned deployment.
He has written two widely read accounts of what American healthcare workers saw while working in Gaza in Politico and the New York Times. In May he briefed the United Nations Security Council on the situation in Gaza. He lived in Israel for 10 months after graduating from college and has repeatedly visited Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory throughout his career as a healthcare worker.
Dr. Sidhwa said: “Israel continues to block approximately half of healthcare workers with Emergency Medical Teams. No reason for the denials is given.”
He noted: “According to the United Nations 2720 monitoring and tracking mechanism, an average of 123 trucks of aid have arrived at their destination daily since the start of the ceasefire agreement on October 10, 2025.” The current Israel-Hamas “ceasefire” deal, signed October 9, 2025 “stipulates that aid will enter Gaza at the rate stipulated in the prior agreement, which was ‘600 trucks daily to include 50 trucks of fuel, 300 of which to the north.’ Israel continues to block the most critical immediate need, which is shelter, for the population living on Gaza’s coast in the winter in improvised shelters. Without adequate shelter Gaza’s children — especially newborns — will again die due to hypothermia in Gaza’s wet, cold, and windy winter, as they did last year despite public warnings.”
Dr. Sidhwa has also worked on humanitarian missions in Ukraine, Haiti, Zimbabwe, and Burkina Faso. He has written about his humanitarian work in Gaza in the New England Journal of Medicine and Dialogues in Health; about his work in Ukraine in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons and the World Journal of Surgery; and about surgical humanitarian principles generally in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons. He is widely published in the medical literature on topics ranging from breast cancer to surgical fixation of rib fractures. He serves as the secretary/treasurer of the Chest Wall Injury Society, and is a fellow of both the American College of Surgeons and the International College of Surgeons.