INVESTIGATION: Children Under Fire in Gaza

On September 13, 2025, the Dutch outlet “de Volkskrant” released a comprehensive investigative report, titled “What The Wounds Are Telling Us,” recounting the story of Doctors who have volunteered in Gaza and cared for over 100 children suffering from gunshot wounds to the head or chest. The report presents compelling evidence that not only suggests but strongly indicates that Israel is intentionally targeting children. 

Fifteen international physicians informed de Volkskrant that while working in hospitals in Gaza, they encountered children aged 15 and under suffering from gunshot wounds to the head or chest. The most conservative estimate indicates that they collectively observed 114 children with such injuries, the majority of whom have succumbed. Eyewitnesses recounted to the doctors that the bullets primarily originated from Israeli army (IDF) snipers or drones. Doctors mentioned to de Volkskrant that they had witnessed injuries potentially caused by controversial fragmentation munitions. The Israeli army has declined to respond to inquiries regarding the shooting of children and asserts that it neither possesses nor employs fragmentation weapons.

The report highlights the compelling story of American Doctor Feroze Sidhwa, who worked in the intensive care unit of the European Hospital in Gaza, and whose testimony at the UN Security Council on the Middle East and Gaza on May 28, 2025, went viral. This American trauma and critical care surgeon shared a personal account of the deteriorating healthcare system in Gaza, based on his two medical missions to Khan Younis. With chilling precision, he described his experiences treating pregnant women “whose pelvises had been shattered and their foetuses severed,” and disclosed that 83% of American medical personnel in Gaza witnessed children shot in the head or chest. His testimony reached a climax with the mass casualty incident on March 18 at Nasser Hospital, where 221 trauma patients were admitted in a single morning – 90 were dead upon arrival, nearly half of whom were children – a surge that no beleaguered health system could endure. This is one of Doctor Feroze Sidhwa’s many statements:

“You cannot claim ignorance,” he concluded, “when children no longer want to live.”

During his testimony at the UN Security Council, Dr. Feroze Sidhwa recounted his experience working with wounded children in Gaza. You can view his full testimony here.

VIDEO: Trauma surgeon tells UN of Israel’s destruction of health care in Gaza (Source: Extract from “Trauma surgeon tells UN of Israel’s destruction of health care in Gaza” from FactPointVideo/Youtube)

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This isn’t the first report where an investigation has revealed that Israel is intentionally targeting children. In August 2025, the BBC World Service reported on the case of two-year-old Layan al-Majdalawi, who lost her life in Gaza in regions where the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) were active. Layan was merely one among over 160 documented cases of children shot during the conflict in Gaza. The BBC report revealed that the majority of children were under the age of 12.

According to a September report from the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), at least 21,000 children have been left disabled during the war. The report estimates that 40,500 children have suffered “new war-related injuries” during the conflict, leaving more than half of them disabled. The question of how many children were injured or killed by Israeli snipers deserves a qualified and quantified answer.

The investigative report from “de Volkskrant” that we are highlighting today undeniably sheds light on some of the most disturbing evidence and facts concerning the children of Gaza who were discovered with a solitary gunshot wound to the head or chest…

Maud Effting and Willem Feenstra reports for de Volkskrant…

What The Wounds Are Telling Us

Doctors in Gaza observed a disturbing pattern: children with a single gunshot wound to the head or chest, a sign that they had been deliberately targeted. This emerges from research by de Volkskrant, which spoke with the doctors who are among the last international eyewitnesses.

Key findings

• Fifteen international doctors told de Volkskrant that during their work in hospitals in Gaza, they saw children aged 15 years and younger with gunshot wounds to the head or chest. According to the most conservative count, they collectively saw 114 children with such wounds, the majority of whom have died.
• Eyewitnesses told the doctors that the bullets mostly came from Israeli army (IDF) snipers or drones.
• According to former commander of the Dutch land forces Mart de Kruif, the chance that these were accidental hits is negligible, since the doctors describe more than a hundred cases.
• Nine doctors told de Volkskrant that they had seen wounds possibly caused by controversial fragmentation weapons.
• The Israeli army refuses to answer questions about shooting at children and says it neither possesses nor uses fragmentation weapons.
• At the bottom, you can read more about how this article was produced.

It is swelteringly hot as American doctor Feroze Sidhwa walks into the intensive care unit of the European Hospital in Gaza. On the hospital grounds, the air smells of sewage and spent explosives. Inside, it smells like rot. And dead bodies.

Sidhwa is a 43-year-old trauma surgeon and critical care physician from California, based at a hospital in Stockton. Among colleagues, he’s held in high regard — not just for his clinical expertise, but also for his international work. He never takes more than a week off, unless it’s for a humanitarian mission. He has worked in crisis zones like Zimbabwe and Haiti, and trained surgeons in Ukraine and Burkina Faso. He wants to go where he’s needed most.

IMAGE: Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, trauma surgeon and critical care physician.

It is March 2024, and this is his first day. A Palestinian nurse is guiding him through the hospital. Then, suddenly, his gaze lands on two young boys lying utterly still in their beds. They look no older than eight or ten, he estimates. Their heads are swathed in bandages. They are on ventilators. The rest of their bodies are intact.

“What happened?” he asks,

The nurse barely speaks English. But she points to their heads. “Shot, shot,” she says.

At first, Sidhwa assumes she’s mistaken. Are they shooting at children? Minutes later, looking at the scans, he sees she was right.

When they step into a second room, they find two more boys in the same condition.

“I thought: what the hell?” he says over the phone to de Volkskrant, his deep voice steady. “How is it possible that, in this small hospital, four children are lying here with gunshot wounds to the head — all admitted within the past 48 hours?”

The four boys are all slowly dying. That evening, Sidhwa makes a note in the diary on his phone. But there’s no time to reflect. Not yet.

In the thirteen days that follow, he sees nine more children with single gunshot wounds to the head or chest — children who were likely shot deliberately. “I started to wonder if my hospital was near some crazy sniper,” Sidhwa says. “Or a drone team killing children just for fun.”

Back home, at a medical conference, Sidhwa meets an American colleague who had worked in another hospital in Gaza just before him. When Sidhwa brings up the children, the man nods. “To my surprise, he said: ‘Yeah, I saw that too — almost every day.’’

The doctor in question, Thaer Ahmad, confirmed this account to de Volkskrant.

“That was the moment,” Sidhwa says, “when I decided: I have to find out what’s really happening here.”

IMAGE: A 6- or 7-year-old girl with a gunshot wound to her head.Photo: Mimi Syed 

The Last Witnesses

Feroze Sidhwa is not the only doctor who, after returning from Gaza, feels compelled to speak out.

For nearly two years, physicians like him have borne witness, from their operating rooms, to the brutality of Israel’s assault on Gaza. They have learned how to hold dying toddlers as they choke on their own blood — because there is no ventilator. They have found the strength to drive a scalpel into a teenager’s chest without anaesthesia — because there is no time, and another patient is already waiting. They have adapted to keep moving as the floor beneath them fills with the bodies of children.

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IMAGES: Feroze Sidhwa and Mark Perlmutter

Some doctors have been left numb. But others have chosen to speak out.

These physicians are among the last international eyewitnesses, as Israel does not allow foreign journalists into Gaza.

They can speak from firsthand experience about the consequences of the genocidal violence, which, with the levelling of Gaza City, has entered its next pitch-black phase.

That role comes with a heavy dilemma. Nearly all of them want to return to Gaza. But going public with what they’ve seen increases the risk that Israel will deny them reentry. According to the United Nations, more than one hundred foreign medical workers have been turned away since March 2025 — often without any official explanation.

Many doctors have come to accept this threat. Being silent is not an option.

Over the past few months, de Volkskrant spoke with seventeen doctors and one nurse from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and the Netherlands. Since October 2023, they have worked in six hospitals and four clinics across Gaza, often returning once or even twice. Most of them have extensive experience working in crisis zones such as Sudan, Afghanistan, Syria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Rwanda, and Ukraine.

At the paper’s request, they handed over hundreds of photos and videos of patients, X-rays, medical notes, and diary entries. They talked for hours. They laid bare what they saw in their operating rooms. And they all faced the same question: what are the wounds telling us about the war? 

An Absolute Hell

British transplant surgeon and professor Nizam Mamode, 63, was already semi-retired when, in the summer of 2024, he received a call from the aid organisation Medical Aid for Palestinians. They asked if he could go to Gaza in August. “I had the time, and I knew I had the skills,” Mamode says. “I’d worked in Rwanda, Sudan, Lebanon — so I said yes. Some people say it was a brave decision, but it wasn’t. To be honest, I had no idea what I was getting myself into.”

IMAGE: Just before the border with Gaza. (Source: Feroze Sidhwa)

It wasn’t until he was riding through Gaza in armored vehicles with more than thirty others from the UN convoy that reality kicked in. “The doors were locked,” he says. “We were instructed: when you set off, do not unlock them — if the Israeli army shoots at you and orders you out, do not get out of the vehicle.”

“Try not to get killed,” the convoy leader told them.

“Two weeks later, the same vehicles were fired upon by Israel,” says Mamode.

Just before that, at a checkpoint, their luggage was searched by men in black uniforms. In Gaza, there is a shortage of nearly all medical supplies. That’s why doctors bring basic items with them. But often, everything is taken away — even baby formula. It has happened on multiple missions, the doctors told de Volkskrant.

The British plastic surgeon Sarmad Tamimi, who crossed into Gaza on June 24 this year, had already been warned by colleagues about confiscations. But he was also aware of the starvation in Gaza and the devastating consequences for babies. “I took baby nutritional supplements out of their boxes and packed only the foil in my luggage,” he says. “To the soldiers, I said I was taking them for myself.”

American emergency physician Mimi Syed managed to smuggle two laryngoscopes under her clothes—indispensable tools for intubating patients. “I was scared,” she admits. “But as a doctor, I need them to save lives. Normally, you throw a laryngoscope away after one use. In Gaza, I used it on at least fifty patients. I had to wipe it and use it again in different patients.”

“This boy was shot in the head. I tried to save him. But he died shortly after I intubated him. He died right in front of me.” Dr. Mimi Syed, emergency medicine physician

“I don’t understand why baby food is confiscated from doctors crossing the border,” says British plastic surgeon Victoria Rose. “I don’t understand why doctors’ medicines are taken away. I don’t understand why half of the doctors are denied entry. There are so many things I don’t understand.”

In a response, the IDF stated the claims about baby formula being confiscated are “entirely incorrect.” The military stated that it was, in fact, working to facilitate the entry of humanitarian aid. According to the IDF, since May 19, 2025, “approximately 5,000 tons of infant formula alone have been transferred into the Gaza Strip, in addition to extensive quantities of other humanitarian aid.”

The doctors interviewed by de Volkskrant worked throughout the war in various hospitals and field clinics, including Nasser, Al-Aqsa, the European Hospital, and Al-Shifa. Some worked with Médecins Sans Frontières and with organisations that asked not to be named, fearing that identification might prevent them from continuing their work. They include general surgeons, orthopaedic surgeons, intensivists, plastic surgeons, trauma surgeons, and emergency physicians. A few were still in Gaza at the time of the interviews. The newspaper also spoke with a trauma nurse with war experience.

The situation in Gaza’s hospitals, many of which have been largely destroyed, is far worse than the doctors had anticipated. “I had to cut off a woman’s leg with scissors,” says emergency physician Syed. “Without pain medication. I had no other choice.”

The wards are heavy with the smell of burnt limbs. “We constantly heard people screaming,” recalls Rotterdam doctor Salih el Saddy. “In our hospital, we had anaesthetics, but no painkillers. Patients woke up after amputations with extreme pain. There was nothing we could do for them.”

“This boy had to undergo a double amputation. His lower legs were kept in the box next to his bed.” Dr. Salih el Saddy.

In the operating rooms, staff are busy keeping flies away from patients who have been cut open. Nizam Mamode watches as a fellow doctor in the intensive care unit tends to a child whose ventilator is not working properly. When he removes the tube from the child’s throat, he sees it’s clogged. “Full of maggots,” says Mamode, “coming from the child’s throat.”

The MRI and dialysis machines, doctors say, are beyond use—riddled with bullet holes. Some operating rooms have been set ablaze. The cables of ultrasound machines have been cut.

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IMAGE: (Source: Feroze Sidhwa)

There’s little time for reflection. Yet at times, without warning, a sense of disbelief creeps in. Mamode experienced this while operating on an 8-year-old girl. “She was bleeding out, so I asked for an abdominal gauze swab to soak up the excess blood and locate the wound,” he recalls.

He was told there was no gauze.

“Suddenly, I thought about the irony of it,” he says. “The word ‘gauze’ supposedly comes from Gaza, because Gazans were famous for their linen. So there we were, in the home of gauze — and I couldn’t get any. I had to scoop the blood out of her body with my hands.”

Emergency physician Adil Husain recorded a video message for his young daughter before his departure, in case they would never see him again. Others arranged their wills. All the doctors interviewed by de Volkskrant felt a strong intrinsic urge to go.

“I’m a surgeon. I want to go where the need is greatest,” says a doctor who will soon return to Gaza and prefers to remain anonymous out of fear of repercussions from Israel. “My work there matters. It’s a signal to the people in Gaza: we have not forgotten you.”

International doctors usually stay in Gaza for two to six weeks, then they are rotated out. Many of them sleep in the hospital and barely leave it for weeks on end. At Nasser Hospital, around fifteen surgeons share a room on the fourth floor, close to the operating theatres. At night, the heat can climb to 100 degrees.

IMAGE: (Source: Feroze Sidhwa)

Surgeon Nizam Mamode sought relief on the stone staircase next to the ward. “I slept on those stairs every night, hoping it would be safe from the drones,” he says. Last month, he witnessed the upper part of that same staircase being destroyed by an Israeli strike — an attack that drew international attention because there was video footage capturing the moment when aid workers and journalists were killed.

The vast majority of injuries come from bomb and shell explosions: people are hit by the blast waves, the heat, flying shrapnel, and collapsing buildings. Shards tear straight through tents. And through the bodies of countless children, who make up more than forty percent of Gaza’s population.

“I’ve seen numerous children with brain matter hanging out,” says MSF-nurse Jack Latour. “I’m sorry—I know no one wants to hear that. But that is what’s happening here.”

The first time surgeon Goher Rahbour found himself in a mass casualty event, he saw a five-year-old girl without a foot. “It was on the floor. The child next to her was also just a kid. Her leg was gone from the knee. Then came another. I froze. I thought: this is absolute hell.”

According to Gaza’s health authorities, more than 64,000 Gazans have died so far, including nearly 20,000 children. Israel questions the reliability of these figures, arguing that the ministry is controlled by Hamas. A group of international researchers concluded in the medical journal The Lancet that the figures from that ministry actually represent an underestimation.  

Children With Gunshot Wounds

Of all the patients, there is one group that shocks doctors most: children with gunshot wounds to the head or chest — and bodies otherwise untouched.

A single bullet to these areas is a strong indication that the child was deliberately targeted. That constitutes a war crime. In other conflict zones, the doctors rarely encountered such cases.

On August 14, 2024, Dr Mimi Syed writes in her journal. The sentences are short. Staccato.

14 August 2024

Girl, 7 years old. Gunshot wound to the chest. Dead on arrival. Tried to save her. Part of a larger mass casualty incident. On the floor, no cots. Nearly slipped in blood. Can’t eat for two days. Can’t swallow anything. Will I be normal again? Dr. Mimi Syed

Syed is an American emergency physician who spent two four-week rotations in Gaza, working at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis and Al Aqsa in Deir al-Balah. “Like most people, I was following the war through livestreams on my phone,” she says.

“But I couldn’t do it anymore. I’m a mother. I couldn’t just watch and do nothing.”

She describes Mira, a 4-year-old girl she saw at Nasser. Her parents bring her in. “They said she’d been shot by a quadcopter [armed drone, ed.] while walking around in the humanitarian zone declared by Israel. I was told to just let her die by my colleagues. The assessment was, unfortunately, that there wasn’t much we could do. But she was still moving a little bit. She was very young. A little girl. I just couldn’t look away. There was something in her face that struck me. So I took a chance.”

Syed intubates the girl using the laryngoscope she had smuggled in herself. Moments later, she stared in disbelief at the scan of Mira’s head: there’s a bullet lodged inside.

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IMAGE: Mira (4) was shot in the head (Source: Mimi Syed)

With the help of her colleagues, Syed manages to keep Mira alive. Later, the little girl will wake up and begin to speak again—a small miracle. Much later, another doctor will remove the bullet from her head.

But Mira is not the only child with a bullet in the head that Syed encounters. She decides to take pictures of them. “I thought: I have to document this. I realised—these are war crimes.” Under extremely stressful conditions, she photographs eighteen children who had been shot in the head or chest. All of them were single shots, she says.

De Volkskrant asked doctors how many children aged 15 and under they had seen with a single gunshot wound to the head and/or chest. The question was deliberately limited to this age group, as children of that age are, in most cases, visibly and unmistakably children.

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IMAGE: A 14-year-old girl was shot in the head and partially paralysed.(Source:: Mimi Syed)

Fifteen out of seventeen doctors said they had encountered children aged 15 or younger with such gunshot wounds. Taken together, they reported 114 children—many of whom did not survive.

Some doctors took photos or made notes; others relied on memory. At the newspaper’s request, they gave the most conservative possible estimates: any cases they were unsure about were excluded. Children who had also been shot in other parts of the body were not included in the count either, as such injuries offer less certainty of deliberate targeting.

The doctors suspect that the total number of children shot in the head or chest is many times higher than the number they personally witnessed. Children who died instantly, they say, often never made it to their departments. Moreover, the doctors were not working in all of Gaza’s hospitals, and only for a limited period of time.

At the newspaper’s request, doctors provided self-taken photos and videos as evidence. In total, de Volkskrant reviewed images of dozens of children with gunshot wounds to the head or chest. The majority of these images will not be published, as they are too graphic.

De Volkskrant presented dozens of images of children with gunshot wounds and various X-rays to two forensic pathologists. They confirmed that the injuries were caused by bullets, not by flying shrapnel.

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IMAGE: A boy (7 or 8) was reportedly shot while playing outside (Source: Mimi Syed)

“It is highly likely that these are long-distance shots aimed at the head and/or neck using military-grade ammunition,” says forensic pathologist Wim Van de Voorde, emeritus professor at the University of Leuven. According to Van de Voorde, the photos are not of sufficient quality to draw legal conclusions — “which is understandable, given the extremely difficult local circumstances.”

Forensic pathologist Frank van de Goot says, “On the X-ray images, I see children’s heads with bullets lodged inside. The bullets must have lost a lot of energy along the way, because children have thinner skulls than adults — otherwise, the bullets would have gone straight through. So these children were shot from a considerable distance.”

That finding is consistent with eyewitness accounts, in which civilians told doctors that the bullets were usually fired by armed drones or snipers of the Israeli military (IDF). Snipers are capable of targeting specific individuals from long distances — sometimes over a thousand meters away. The IDF declined to answer questions about snipers shooting at children.

According to former commander of the Dutch Army, Mart de Kruif, the likelihood that these are accidental hits is virtually zero, given that the doctors describe more than a hundred such cases. “Just think about how small the head is compared to the rest of the body,” he says. “If you’re seeing a high number of gunshot wounds to the chest area and the head, that’s not collateral damage — that’s deliberate targeting.”

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and the military leadership have consistently denied that soldiers deliberately shoot at Palestinian civilians. However, anonymous soldiers have repeatedly admitted in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that this does happen. Breaking the Silence, an Israeli organisation of military veterans, also revealed—based on hundreds of interviews with soldiers—that they were ordered to shoot anyone entering a certain area. “Adult, male — kill,” says a captain in the investigative report The Perimeter.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and the military leadership have consistently denied that soldiers are deliberately targeting Palestinian civilians. But anonymous soldiers have repeatedly admitted otherwise in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

In August, the BBC published the findings of an investigation into more than 160 children who were shot in Gaza. In 95 of those cases, the bullet struck the head or chest. The BBC spoke with eyewitnesses in 59 instances. In 57 of them, the shot was attributed to the Israeli military. In just two cases, the bullet was said to have come from Palestinian fire.

Most of the doctors interviewed by de Volkskrant said they wished they had gathered more evidence afterwards, but in the chaos of Gaza, this simply wasn’t possible. Or they didn’t dare to try. Orthopaedic surgeon Mark Perlmutter (69), who has carried out forty humanitarian missions, said: “I wish I had had the presence of mind to document more.”

“This is my biggest regret,” adds American anesthesiologist and intensivist Ahlia Kattan. “But I was treating patients. At that moment, it simply wasn’t at the top of my mind. I wish someone had told me beforehand that I should not only act as a doctor, but also as a journalist.”

“Beforehand, the ngo’s told us: don’t document anything, don’t take notes, don’t take photos,” says Feroze Sidhwa. “They’re terrified that Israel will then bar them from entering Gaza.”

But their memories of the children are sometimes remarkably detailed.

“During a mass casualty incident, I was walking through the emergency department,” Perlmutter recalls. “Children were everywhere. I was turning them over, trying to see who I could still help. And then I saw those two little boys. They were dead. They had both been shot through the chest and the head. Six or seven years old. I examined them. I asked the medical assistant to take photos.” The photos are in possession of this newspaper.

Perlmutter remembers hearing the man who brought in one of the boys screaming. “He couldn’t understand why a shooter had hit this child—and not him, the adult.” Moments later, he sees the man, probably the father of the child, sobbing. The man sits in shock on the floor, while the child is taken to the morgue. Perlmutter takes out his iPhone and snaps a photo.

IMAGE: A man mourns after a child (6 or 7) was shot in the chest and head and died (Source: Mark Perlmutter)

Continue reading this investigation in de Volkskrant

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Source: https://21stcenturywire.com/2025/09/15/investigation-children-under-fire-in-gaza/