The True/False Film Fest was this past weekend, and one of the film's shown, American Doctor follows three physicians who've provided medical care in Gaza during the last few years.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
KBIA's Rebecca Smith sat down with Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, one of the protagonists of the film, to speak about his work in Gaza and how it looks different from the care he provides here at home.
Rebecca Smith: So, Feroze —you work as a criticalist, is that right? Like in an emergency room?
Dr. Feroze Sidhwa: So, I'm a trauma, general and critical care surgeon. So basically, I run an ICU as long as the patient is a surgery patient, and then I do general surgery as well. So, you know, hernia repairs.
Rebecca Smith: Right. So, I guess I'm curious, like, as someone who's worked in trauma in the US — in a hospital in California, like, how does that compare with the trauma and the work you've done, and then things you've seen while working in other countries, like in Gaza?
Dr. Feroze Sidhwa: There are a lot of injuries that I saw in Gaza that would have been survivable in the United States because there would have been one of them, and we would have been at San Joaquin General Hospital, which is a small hospital.
Actually, both hospitals I worked at in Gaza are bigger than the one I work at in the United States, at least in terms of bed capacity.
San Joaquin has, I think, 154 beds, which is a very small hospital, and Nasser has 240 and European has 200, 250. I can't remember. But they're both bigger than the one I work at. So, it's not size that's the issue. It's the fact that the hospital is massively overwhelmed.
It doesn't matter how much hospital capacity you have, it's never going to be enough to deal with something like this.Dr. Feroze Sidhwa
You could take, and I mean this quite literally, you could take all of the level one trauma centers in Boston, you could take all of them — I think together, they have something like 4000 hospital beds and something like 200 operating rooms and something like 400 or 500 trauma capable surgeons — you could take all of them and spread them around Gaza, they still would be completely overwhelmed.
There is no way to build into a society the capacity to actually deal with the traumatic injuries that were inflicted on Gaza in the past two years.
And forget the past two years — even just since the ceasefire. So let's see, today, the ceasefire started October 10, or something like that. So, November, December, January, February. So, it's been for about four months.
In that time, about 500 to 600 people have been killed — I'm talking about through military violence, 500 to 600 people have been killed. I don't know the numbers of injured off the top of my head.
PRODUCER NOTE: During the ongoing ceasefire, which began October 10, 2025, the Palestinian Ministry of Health has reported more than 600 people killed and more than 1,500 injured. Doctors Without Borders reports more than 18,500 Palestinians are awaiting medical evacuation from Gaza.
My hospital sees 4,000 trauma activations every year, maybe about 20% of whom have serious injuries.
So, we see, you know, 800 to 1000 serious injuries every year and the catchment area of my hospital is half the size of Gaza's population.
That means that my hospital would have to operate at like, 100 or 200 times its normal capacity to deal with the violence that's going in Gaza now during a ceasefire.
This is absurd, like it's just, it's completely insane. It doesn't matter how much hospital capacity you have, it's never going to be enough to deal with something like this.
Unless you live in a society that has two hospital beds for every 10 people, and every other person is a doctor or nurse, which obviously is completely ridiculous. There's no way anybody's — and furthermore, they're all trauma doctors, there's no medicine doctors, there's no pediatricians, like, this is literally what it would require.
Rebecca Smith: Well, Feroze, thank you so much for your time today and for sharing about your work. I really, really appreciate it.
Dr. Feroze Sidhwa: Thank you.
