Dr. Feroz Sidhwa, an American volunteer trauma surgeon in Gaza, told antiwar.org that he was nearly hit by an Israeli airstrike that targeted Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis on Sunday evening, killing a 16-year-old boy he was treating.

Sidhwa said he was on his way to the men's surgery ward, which had been hit by an Israeli airstrike, when someone asked him to help treat a bleeding patient in the intensive care unit.

"I went in there and helped, and about 10 minutes later, the explosion happened. So, I probably would have been standing next to Ibrahim, the boy who was killed," Sidhwa described.

Sidhwa added that he was planning to change the boy's medical bandage. "I might have been standing next to him and talking to his family when that explosion happened if I hadn't been taken to the unit like that," he said. The bombing also killed Ismail Barhoum, a member of Hamas's political bureau, who was receiving treatment in the hospital. The Israeli military claimed responsibility for the strike, saying Barhoum was the target.

Al-Quds newspaper published an article last Thursday (March 20) quoting Dr. Firoz Sidhwa's account of what he witnessed on Tuesday morning, March 18, when Israel resumed its intensive bombing campaign on the besieged Gaza Strip, killing more than 400 Palestinians, including more than 180 children and hundreds of women.

Sidhwa said he and the medical team at Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis performed surgeries "almost exclusively on women and children."

He added that the first patient he found was a three- or four-year-old girl "suffering from shortness of breath, a weak pulse, and multiple shrapnel wounds to her head and face," and that he had to tell her father that she would not survive.

"You can't bomb hospitals just because there are people in them who you suspect are criminals or even a threat to you," Sidhwa noted.

"Benjamin Netanyahu, who is accused of genocide and many other crimes, had a prostatectomy in late December and was hospitalized for four days. No one would have imagined that Hamas would be allowed to bomb the hospital where he was and that people would say, 'Oh yes, that was legal,'" Sidhwa added.

Sidhwa said the strike was the first time one of his patients had been killed "due to violence in a hospital bed," and called on the United States to stop arming Israel. "We have to stop, we have to stop, we have to stop," he said, referring to the US government's supply of bombs to Israel.

Other doctors working in Gaza reported similar experiences when the bombing resumed. Dr. Mark Perlmutter, another American volunteer who was working at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in central Gaza at the time, told The Guardian: "At no time were there fewer than 65 people in the emergency room, all with open wounds, mostly women and children... The floor was soaked with blood."