To the BOCC,



In January, a coalition of Alachua County community groups brought forward
a ceasefire resolution to the County Commission. In the time since the
commission failed to pass this resolution, the destruction of Gaza has
further worsened into one of the greatest humanitarian disasters of the 21st
century. This assault has resulted in the deaths of 34,480 Palestinians,
14,000 of whom are children. Of Gaza’s 35 hospitals, only 11 remain
partially functioning.

Dr. Bashar Alzghoul, a local pulmonologist with UF Shands Hospital, has
just recently returned from a 2-week medical mission to Gaza. In this time,
he bore witness to the constant violence directed at Palestinians in Gaza. “We
walked through the wards and immediately found evidence of horrifying
violence deliberately directed at civilians and even children. A
three-year-old boy shot in the head, a 12-year-old girl shot through the
chest, an ICU nurse shot through the abdomen, all by some of the
best-trained marksmen in the world.” We have attached the full statement
from the team of doctors that he worked with below for the BOCC to read.

The tragedies that Dr. Alzghoul witnessed are the direct result of U.S.
policy. The United States of America, from the federal to local levels,
directly funds Israel’s campaign against Palestinian life. As healthcare
workers committed to the protection of human life, we hold incredible
respect for those such as Dr. Alzghoul who have put themselves in harm’s
way to provide medical care. We further respect the sacrifice of those
healthcare workers in Gaza who have died providing this care. In comparison
to this sacrifice, we view the passage of a ceasefire resolution as the
bare minimum that we can do locally to show our support.

Since the last attempt to pass a resolution through the BOCC, over 200
healthcare workers in Alachua county have signed onto our call for a
ceasefire resolution to the commission. We have further received
endorsements from over 50 local businesses, unions, and religious
organizations. Polling has shown that a majority of Americans, across the
political aisle, support a permanent ceasefire to the assault on Gaza. If
the commission fails to move forward with this resolution, it will be
failing to act with the will of its constituents.

We call on the commissioners to endorse and to vote in favor of this
resolution.

-ACHCW4G

Dr. Bashar Alzghoul sent this letter to us while he was volunteering in
Gaza with the Palestinian American Medical Association in collaboration
with the World Health Organization.
It was written by two of his colleagues who he was working side by side
with in Gaza.


On March 25 the two of us, an orthopedic surgeon and a trauma surgeon,
traveled to the Gaza Strip to work at Gaza European Hospital. We were
immediately overwhelmed by the overflown sewage and the distinct smell of
gunpowder in the air. We made the short journey from the Rafah crossing to
Khan Younis, where Gaza European Hospital stands as one of the last
remaining semi-functional hospitals for the 2.5 million human beings - half
of them children - in the Gaza Strip. As humanitarian surgeons we thought
we had seen all manner of cruelty in the world, but neither one of us has
ever experienced anything like what we found when we arrived in Gaza.

We exited the van into a sea of children, all shorter and thinner than they
ought to have been. Even over their screams of joy at meeting new
foreigners, the snowmobile-like hum of Israeli drones could be heard
overhead. That background noise is a constant reminder that violence and
death can rain down on anyone at any time in this besieged and ransacked
territory.

Our limited sleep is constantly interrupted by explosions that shake the
hospital’s walls and pop our ears, even well after the United Nations
Security Council declared a ceasefire must be implemented. When warplanes
scream overhead everyone braces for a particularly loud and powerful
explosion. The timing of these explosions always coincides with “iftar”,
when families in this overwhelmingly Muslim county break the daily fast of
Ramadan and are most vulnerable.

We walked through the wards and immediately found evidence of horrifying
violence deliberately directed at civilians and even children. A
three-year-old boy shot in the head, a 12-year-old girl shot through the
chest, an ICU nurse shot through the abdomen, all by some of the
best-trained marksmen in the world. Every square inch of the hospital’s
floor is taken up with makeshift tents where displaced families live. They
are the lucky several hundred who get to live indoors, unlike the tens of
thousands sheltering outside on the hospital’s grounds.

As we got to work we were shocked by the violence inflicted on people.
Incredibly powerful explosives ripped apart rock, floors, and walls and
threw them through human bodies, penetrating skin with waves of dirt and
debris. With the environment literally embedded in our patients’ bodies we
have found infection control to be impossible. No amount of medical care
could ever compensate for the damage being inflicted here.

As humanitarian trauma surgeons we have both seen incredible suffering.
Collectively we were present at Ground Zero on 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and
the 2010 earthquake in Haiti on the first day of these disasters. We have
worked in the depravation of southern Zimbabwe and the horrors of both the
war in Ukraine and attended primary trauma services to those injured in the
Boston Marathon. Together we have worked on more than 40 surgical missions
in developing countries on three continents in our combined 57 years of
volunteering. This long experience taught us that there was no greater pain
as a humanitarian surgeon than being unable to provide needed care to a
patient. But that was before coming to Gaza. Now we know the pain of being
unable to properly treat a child who will slowly die, but also alone,
because she is the only surviving member of an entire extended family. We
have not had the heart to tell these children how their families died:
burnt until they resembled blistered hotdogs more than human beings,
shredded to pieces such that they can only be buried in mass graves, or
simply entombed in their former apartment buildings to die slowly of
asphyxia and sepsis.

The United States has heavily funded and overwhelmingly armed what is
called “the occupation” of Palestine, but the term is misleading. Israel’s
first president, Chaim Weizmann, declared that the existence of the
Palestinians was simply “a matter of no consequence.” Thirty years later,
Israeli defense minister Moshe Dayan told the Israeli cabinet that the
Palestinians “would continue to live like dogs…and we will see where this
process leads.” Now we know: this is where it leads. It leads to Gaza
European Hospital, and to two trauma surgeons realizing that the blood on
the floor of the trauma bay and the operating room is dripping from our own
hands, as we provide the crucial funding, weapons, and diplomatic support
for a genocidal assault on a helpless population.

The two of us continue to hope against hope that American politicians, and
especially President Biden, will abandon their support for Israel’s war on
the Palestinians. If they do not, then we have learned nothing from the
history of the past hundred years. Voltaire quipped that “no snowflake
feels responsible for the avalanche”, but we as Americans must acknowledge
that we are responsible for this crime against humanity that is unfolding
in front of the entire world.

Israel has dropped so much American ordinance on Gaza that it now exceeds
the explosive force of the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. More
children have been killed in Gaza than were killed in all war zones in the
entire world in the past four years. No conflict of any size in history has
ever been this deadly to journalists, healthcare workers, or paramedics.
Indeed, we and our entire team live in constant fear that Israel will
attack this hospital directly, as it has with so many others.

We came to Gaza as two individual snowflakes trying to stop this avalanche
of death and horror, and yet we also feel responsible for it. We urge
anyone who reads this to publicly oppose sending weapons to Israel as long
as this genocide continues, until the Israeli siege of Gaza is lifted, and
until an end to the occupation can be negotiated.

Mark Pearlmutter, MD, FACS
Orthopedics Hand Surgery Specialist

Feroze Sidhwa, MD, MPH, FACS
Trauma, acute care, general surgeron, neurocritical care intensivists

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