What the wounds are telling us - European Press Prize

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2026 Winner<br>What the wounds are telling us

by Maud Effting, Willem Feenstra

published by De Volkskrant, the Netherlands

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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.

To view the full article in English in its original layout, including all images and graphics, please follow this link. Please note: the original publication contains explicit and disturbing images and text.

To read the slightly shortened English text without images and graphics, continue below.

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.

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.”

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.

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 first-hand 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...