Almost 100 American health care workers who have served in Gaza are demanding a U.S. arms embargo on Israel until a permanent cease-fire is reached — the latest plea for the Biden administration to end its unconditional support for Israel ahead of the anniversary of the country’s siege on the Palestinian territory.
In a Wednesday letter first obtained by HuffPost, the multifaith and multiethnic group of physicians, surgeons, nurses and midwives are also demanding a meeting at the White House so they can discuss Israeli war crimes they say they witnessed while volunteering in Gaza’s hospitals and clinics.
“President [Joe] Biden and Vice President [Kamala] Harris, we wish you could see the nightmares that plague so many of us since we have returned: dreams of children maimed and mutilated by our weapons, and their inconsolable mothers begging us to save them,” the letter reads.
“We wish you could hear the cries and screams our consciences will not let us forget. We cannot fathom why you continue arming the country that is deliberately killing these children en masse.”
The signatories make up the majority of American medical professionals who have worked in Gaza since Oct. 7, when Hamas militants killed 1,200 people and captured about 250 in an attack on Israel. Almost a year later, roughly 100 hostages are estimated to still be in captivity, one-third of whom are presumed dead.
In response, Israel launched its ongoing U.S.-funded bombardment of Gaza, killing what the enclave’s health ministry says is more than 42,000 Palestinians (the letter’s signatories estimate the real number is closer to 119,000, or about 5.4% of the population). Almost a thousand of those killed are Palestinian health care workers themselves, the letter says, not including medical workers who have been taken by Israeli forces to what are being described as torture camps.
The health care workers, who have spent a combined 254 weeks in Gaza since Oct. 7, also released an appendix that includes the data they used to inform their letter.
Israel’s military offensive has destroyed Gaza’s land and infrastructure while blocking most humanitarian assistance from entering the territory. In addition to the death and mutilation caused by bombs and bullets, Palestinians trapped in the enclave face displacement, sickness and starvation — and with no fully functioning hospitals and little access to medicine and sanitary resources, health care workers there are struggling to stop the rising death toll and slow the spread of disease.
“These things are all concealed – the malnutrition, the disease, the displacement, the lack of sanitation, and then the destruction of the water infrastructure. There’s literally no potable water in Gaza,” said the letter’s organizer Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a California-based trauma and critical care surgeon who volunteered at European Hospital earlier this year in the southeastern part of central Gaza’s Khan Younis governorate.
“All of that together is conspiring to basically just kill children constantly,” he told HuffPost. “And that’s definitely what’s happening.”
Every medical worker in the letter said that they did not personally see any kind of Palestinian militant activity at any of Gaza’s overrun health care facilities, contradicting Israel’s justification for laying siege to the enclave’s hospitals.
What they did regularly see, the letter says, were mostly women and children either severely injured or dead. The health care workers say they routinely treated preteen Palestinian children whose bullet wounds to the head or chest signaled they were deliberately targeted by the Israeli military.
“Virtually every child under the age of five whom we encountered, both inside and outside of the hospital, had both a cough and watery diarrhea. We found cases of jaundice … in nearly every room of the hospitals in which we served, and in many of our healthcare colleagues in Gaza,” the letter says, adding that a high percentage of surgical incisions end up infected due to conditions at hospitals.
“Malnutrition led to widespread spontaneous abortions, underweight newborns, and an inability of new mothers to breastfeed. This left their newborns at high risk of death given the lack of access to potable water anywhere in Gaza. Many of those infants died,” the medical workers testified. “In Gaza we watched malnourished mothers feed their underweight newborns infant formula made with poisonous water. We can never forget that the world abandoned these innocent women and babies.”
The health care workers, some of whom signed a letter in July that had similar demands, called on the Biden administration to change its current Middle East policy and hold Israel accountable before both U.S. and international law.
So far, the administration has doubled down on its support for Israel as the conflict expands to include the occupied West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and potentially Iran.
Spokespeople for Biden, Harris and Harris’ presidential campaign did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.
Read the letter here: