In a July 2024 piece for Politico, Mark Perlmutter, an American doctor who volunteered in Gaza, shared accounts of the horrors of the war.
He arrived in the Hamas-ruled territory with other volunteers in March 2024, during Ramadan, and left in April. With his Politico co-author, Perlmutter described an increase in bombing runs after sunset. “We noticed that bombing seemed to peak at iftar when families were gathered together to break the fast during Ramadan with whatever food they had available,” they wrote. “Most of the bombardment was directed at empty buildings, but when an inhabited one was hit we’d see a flood of casualties.”
Unintended casualties from those strikes in Gaza, where the Hamas perpetrators of the Oct 7 massacre burrow themselves under civilian infrastructure, are tragic enough. But it seems Perlmutter wanted more. In an interview with Turkish television three months after his essay appeared in Politico, the doctor gave a more sinister account of those same airstrikes:
… I was there during Ramadan. The meal at the end of Ramadan, iftar– right before iftar, the drones would be more audible, clearly visualizing where people were congregating. And the bombs would concentrate in those areas.
The effectiveness of a non-discriminate, 2,000-pound American bomb on a collection of women and children is much more impactful if you know where the people are collecting. And 10 minutes after the bomb would go off in the distance, the few ambulances that were still operational, and many, many cars and even donkey-pulled and horse-pulled carts, would start showing up with injured people.
And often, in a room smaller than the space that we’re sitting in, enough to hold four classic hospital gurneys, four gurneys would show up, and on each gurney was 3 to 5 kids, almost exclusively kids. Ninety percent of our new admissions were kids. And there’d be 15, 20 kids coming in at the end of every bombing.
The setting is identical in the two accounts. But his description of events couldn’t be more different. Instead of bombs falling on empty buildings, as he told Politico in July, his story in October was that every bombing not only struck women and children, but carefully targeted them.
Doctor Mark Perlmutter speaks with Turkish state television TRT World.
Perlmutter is one of the doctors cited in a New York Times opinion piece, written by a fellow medical volunteer, that effectively accuses Israel of shooting children as a matter of policy. His incompatible stories of Israeli bombings show that he is not merely an extremist — one who pushes tropes about the corrupting power of Jewish money and who insists the war with Hamas is “nothing more than a fucking land grab” — but also a fabulist.
And his account to the Turkish television network is by definition fantastical. A volunteer doctor, however confident his presentation, would have no way of knowing the drones’ mission, the weight of the bombs dropped, and especially the location and target of the airstrikes.
He can’t seem to make up his mind on what bombs to imagine were dropped, either. Above, he casts every projectile as a 2,000-pound bomb. Elsewhere, though, he insists the bombs dropped on Gaza are on the whole cluster bombs. It can’t be both — the 2,000-pound MK-84/GBU-31s in Israel’s arsenal are not cluster bombs. Rather, it is neither. By all indications, the vast majority of bombs used by Israel have been smaller than the 2,000-pound MK-84/GBU-31s in its arsenal. And the Washington Post reported in December that “Israel is not documented to have used cluster munitions.”
If the idea that Ramadan’s communal gatherings allowed sadistic Israelis to feast on innocent lives fails the smell test, it also fails the numerical test. According to the Hamas government’s own flawed figures, roughly 2,000 Palestinians were killed between the start and end of Ramadan — many in battles between Hamas gunmen and the IDF, others in airstrikes on top Hamas terror leaders. The average of 75 deaths per day during this period represents a substantive decrease from the month prior. It is dramatically less than the rate during the first several months of the war. And it is a small fraction of the casualty rate in the U.S. war to overthrow the Iraqi regime in 2003.
Perlmutter isn’t the only medical professional in the New York Times essay with credibility issues. Asma Taha, a nurse volunteer cited in the piece, had previously claimed that every day she saw babies who “had been born healthy” die of starvation at her hospital in southern Gaza.
This is evidently false. As Mark Zlochin pointed out, Gaza hospitals had only officially registered 10 children who died of starvation at that point, none of whom were in southern Gaza. Additional children “reportedly died,” in UNICEF’s language, from malnutrition or dehydration in hard-hit northern Gaza, but again, not the south where Taha worked. A doctor at her hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit said premature babies with health issues have died, a tragic fact of life in the region regardless of war, but this isn’t what the nurse claimed—she spoke of children born healthy. Again, hunger and death in a war-torn territory is terrible enough. But again, a New York Times source seems intent on embellishing.
Khawaja Ikram, another doctor quoted in the New York Times essay, recounts treating two children whose father said they were shot by snipers. But curiously, in a version of the story Ikram shared a few months earlier with NBC News, there was only one child.
Doctor Nahreen Ahmed, also quoted in the essay, recently signed a letter casting doubt on Israeli and American claims that Palestinian armed groups use hospitals for their operations. “We wish to be absolutely clear: not once did any of us see any type of Palestinian militant activity in any of Gaza’s hospitals or other healthcare facilities,” the letter asserts.
But some months earlier, when asked by NPR about the phenomenon, Nahreen was evasive, and instead of answering the question responding with spin that suggested she did encounter militant activity:
NPR host Scott Simon: Just Monday of this week, there was a raid on the al-Shifa hospital, where reportedly 20 people were killed. The Israeli military contends that there were Hamas fighters working in the hospital. Did you see any evidence, wherever you were, that Hamas is using hospitals to operate?
Nahreen Ahmed: All I can speak about is what I witnessed, and what I witnessed was hospitals that were in complete and utter devastation with lack of supplies, lack of resources, lack of health care workers able to staff the number of patients. And that was the overwhelming imagery that we saw on a daily basis. And that was really what – you know, that’s the truth.
It might be the truth, but it’s clearly not a denial. Notably, Ahmed spent two weeks volunteering at Nasser Hospital — the same medical facility where Sharon Aloni Cunio, Ada Sagi, and many other former Israeli hostages were held captive.
The author of the New York Times essay, Feroze Sidhwa, has also given reason to question his credibility. While falsely insinuating that levels of hunger in Gaza are akin to those in Nazi concentration camps, Sidhwa pointed to a photo of an skeletal Palestinian he says he took in a hospital in Khan Younis — “and that was when Khan Younis was the safer part of Gaza,” he concluded.
The comment is disingenuous. As Sidhwa knows, the boy pictured in the photo, Rafiq Doghmosh, did not become malnourished in the “safer,” southern city of Khan Younis, but rather in Gaza City, on the northern side of the territory, where he was trapped in Shifa Hospital for two weeks during pitched battles between Palestinian militants and Israeli soldiers. In other words, Doghmosh isn’t proof that Khan Younis, or even Gaza City, is blighted by emaciating malnutrition. He certainly isn’t proof that Gazans are like Holocaust victims, broadly wasted from hunger. He represents a tragic outlier case — one that Sidhwa effectively lied about. (Update, Oct. 29: Further undercutting Sidhwa’s narrative, the patient was trapped in the hospital with an injury, sustained in northern Gaza, that affected his ability to eat.)
Although he claims to be “no fan of Hamas,” Sidhwa has raised additional questions about his credibility by propagandizing in defense of the terror group. On social media, he suggested that Hamas would give the International Committee of the Red Cross access to Israeli hostages if only Israel would do the same for Palestinian prisoners held in Israel. (Israel cut off ICRC access after the Oct. 7 attack.) It is an absurd claim. Hamas’s modus operandi was known long before Oct. 7, when it prevented the ICRC from accessing Israeli captives like Avera Mengistu, Hisham al-Sayed, and Gilad Shalit.
In order to insinuate that Gazans have been uniquely malnourished for years, Sidhwa and Perlmutter wrote of arriving in Gaza and being “greeted by a sea of children, all shorter and thinner than they ought to have been.” The document they link to states that nine percent of Gazan children under five are stunted, a figure that isn’t atypical globally. In fact, it’s half the rate as in neighboring Egypt, nearly the same as in the Kingdom of Jordan, and lower than dozens of other countries including but not limited to Armenia, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Albania, Oman, Colombia, Morocco, and South Africa.
Elsewhere, Sidhwa, Perlmutter, Ahmed and other medical professionals cited in the New York Times sought to suggest Hamas casualty figures dramatically undercount deaths, arguing in a letter that “The Gaza Health Ministry only reports deaths caused directly by violence that arrive at a hospital morgue. As noted above, these are typically the smallest number of deaths in any major and protracted conflict.” But the claim is demonstrably false.
Considering the wild accusations pushed in the New York Times essay, questions raised about the article’s presentation and the ethics, and the fact that most of the essay’s claims are unverifiable, first-person accounts that depend on readers’ trust, the credibility of the cited healthcare professionals cited in the piece matters. But the sampling of concerns cited above reveals it to be lacking.
Update (10/28):
Feroze Sidhwa, the author of the Times essay, again propagandized on behalf of Hamas during an Oct. 16, 2024 interview with Noam Dworman. While insisting that Hamas’s illegal strategy shielding behind civilians is equivalent to the placement in Western capitals of national security offices, Sidhwa denied that Hamas constructed and used tunnels under Al Shifa hospital:
Dworman: If Israel started putting … Iron Dome batteries on Dizengoff Street, that would obviously be something quite different, and that is akin– when Hamas– we have seen these these launchers purposely, when when there was open spaces nearby, they bring them in where the population is dense.
Sidhwa: I’d be surprised if you’ve seen that with your own eyes but the if you have again please send it to me I’d be very interested seeing it. I have a hard time believing that from a video–
Dworman: We’ve seen video of rockets being launched from buildings–
Sidhwa: Right, but if the building’s empty–
Dworman: In the AP building was all kinds of stuff at one time, wasn’t it?
Sidhwa: I seriously doubt the Associated Press–
Dworman: The New York Times found these tunnels under al Shifa hospital–
Sidhwa: No no no, see, that’s–
Dworman: Wait, wait we’re off the subject.
Sidhwa: Fair enough, but it’s important to be truthful about this. The New York Times didn’t find tunnels under Shifa Hospital. Israel built tunnels under Shifa Hospital in the 80s when Israel built the hospital itself. Do you remember what happened…
Dworman: They found them being in use.
Sidhwa: No, they did not, sir.
Dworman: Well I just read you I read you what they wrote.
Sidhwa: They– so remember
Dworman: I don’t think New York Times wrote a story about the fact that they found some old tunnel that’s out of use
Sidhwa: Okay. I would encourage you to read the details about this, because it’s very interesting …
Dworman is correct in the first part of the exchange. There is plenty of video and eyewitness evidence of Hamas placing rocket launchers in densely populated places, including near buildings that not empty, when there is more open space nearby. (See, e.g., here, here, here, and here). Why does Sidhwa seek to deny the evidence?
What of al Shifa hospital, and those “details” that, in Sidhwa account, exculpate Hamas? We can follow Dworman’s suggestion and look to the New York Times. According to one report, “[E]vidence examined by The New York Times suggests Hamas used the hospital for cover, stored weapons inside it and maintained a hardened tunnel beneath the complex that was supplied with water, power and air-conditioning.” The piece includes video from under the hospital showing Hamas’s unmistakable tunnel construction style. Previously, the paper reported that U.S. intelligence independently confirmed Hamas’s use of the hospital. Again, why does Sidhwa deny and defend Hamas?
Update (10/30):
Mark Perlmutter is not just quoted in Feroze Sidhwa’s New York Times essay, but is also a co-leader, along with Sidhwa, of a media campaign charging Israel with intentionally targeting children. Posts on Perlmutter’s social media shed light on the low standard of proof needed before levelling that accusation.
In one video Perlmutter posted to Instagram, an activist charges that Israel intentionally targeted two infant twins and their mother. The fringe TikTok activist making the accusation, which Perlmutter explicitly endorses, feigns knowledge that Israel dropped a bomb after using infrared imagery to determine that the twins, their mother, and grandmother were alone in the house. No evidence is provided.
The video Perlmutter posted goes on to charge that Israel killed the mother to silence her:
Why? Doctor Jumann Arfa. She had been posting to her personal Facebook page about the snipers targeting children directly in the head and chest, which she was personally witness to. They killed an woman, and her children, and her mother, to keep her silent.
The activist from Perlmutter’s video claimed elsewhere that Israel killed Arfa “to make sure that she couldn’t testify to the ICJ about sniped children.”
In fact, Arfa’s Facebook page says nothing about her having witnessed snipers targeting children. Nor did she reach that conclusion from her work as a doctor — Arfa describes herself as a pharmacist and “trainer for estheticians.” The one reference on her page to Israel intentionally targeting civilians is a clip of Perlmutter’s interview on CBS Mornings — hardly something Israel would expect to silence by killing Arfa. The incident is tragic, but here again, the possibility of any mistake in war is ignored in favor of inflammatory, unsubstantiated TikTok analysis.
In another social media post, Perlmutter shares an image of a badly injured leg. (The graphic image can be seen here.) This was apparently enough for him to conclude that Israeli soldiers used the boy as “target practice.” He offers no evidence of intent. (Nor is there any indication of the source of the wound. Video that purports to show Hamas shooting Palestinians in the leg has circulated on Telegram and other social media.
Update (10/31):
Another of the healthcare workers quoted in the New York Times essay, Abeerah Muhammad, has shared false Gaza casualty figures, suggesting interest in promoting a particular narrative about Gaza might eclipse her interest in accuracy. “As of July, the UN estimates that women and children account for 70% of those killed in the current assault on Gaza,” the volunteer nurse claims in a September 2024 article.
Contrary to Muhammad’s claim, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has explicitly, clearly, and repeatedly noted that the casualty figures it has shared — including throughout July — are not the “UN estimates,” but rather figures provided by the Hamas government’s health ministry and relayed without verification by the UN.
More concerningly, OCHA’s July reports do not show women and children accounting for 70 percent of those killed. In the Gaza health ministry figures shared in OCHA’s July reports, roughly 24,600 of 40,000 fatalities are described as “identified” and subcategorized by age and sex. The “women” and “children” subcategories account for about 50 percent of those.