Dr. Mark Perlmutter: A Righteous Mission To Save the Innocents of Gaza

Sept.19—The following is an edited transcript of the Sept. 16, 2024, opening remarks by Dr. Mark Perlmutter to the weekly Sare-Vega and Friends Monday night Zoom discussion. The full Sept. 16 meeting is available here .

Dr. Perlmutter, a hand and upper extremity orthopedic surgeon, is the president of the World Surgical Foundation, and he is the past president of the United States section of the International College of Surgeons. He has served in over 40 life-saving missions in the last 30 years, including the 9/11 attack in Manhattan, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in Shreveport, Louisiana, and the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. According to Dr. Perlmutter, none of his previous experiences prepared him for the gruesome carnage he witnessed in Gaza.

What I mentioned earlier offline was that all those experiences that I’ve had in my life combined, didn’t exceed what we saw in our first week in Gaza—just the first week.

I personally brought in 700 pounds of medical supplies. Partners of mine that I met for the first time in my life in Cairo, two hours before we drove through the Sinai for 15 hours to get there, but others brought 1000 pounds of supplies. All of our literally tons and tons of supplies that we brought with us were gone in the first week. That’s how deprived the hospitals were.

When we got there, the overwhelming thing that shocked us was that the disproportionate density of the patients were children. Gaza is 50% high-school kids or younger; therefore, when a bomb—which is indiscriminate—drops on a tent city or an apartment building, or a playground, a mosque, a Catholic church, or even on a synagogue which existed in the Gaza Strip, it didn’t really care who it killed. But certainly 50% of those or more who were killed were at least going to be children. But a disproportionate number were children, and that’s because kids can’t be bouncing around as much. Kids are always concentrated, so the effect of a bomb when it’s dropped on a concentrated population like a playground is more effective. And then, the timing of the bombing was quite distinct, in that it was—although it was all day long—it was really concentrated at the evening prayer and evening dinner.

2000-Pound Bombs vs. Children

I was there during Ramadan, and the evening meal, Iftar, was around 4:00-4:30 p.m. And the drones would start flying with more density overhead. The sighting for where the bombs were going to drop was the reason why the drones were there, and the bombs would drop on areas where there were concentrations of people so that their lethal effectiveness was enhanced. These are 2000-lb. bunker-busting bombs designed for underground—below concrete, 20 feet below the ground secure bunkers in Afghanistan—not a collection of tent cities where the same bomb would send shrapnel through 500 tents and through 50 people before it came to rest inside of somebody’s chest.

The overwhelming thing that we were left with after a couple days was that this population was being targetted. We saw not a single combatant; not a single person who we could remotely think was a combatant. We did see people with sniper bullet wounds. I personally saw two children who were shot not once by a high-velocity bullet round—which has a distinctly different trauma pattern than a pistol round, and it has a distinctly different pattern than shrapnel from a bomb or the illegal cluster bombs that Israel was dropping—supplied by our taxpayer dollars—I saw two children who were shot twice by snipers; not once, but twice. One father described that his kid was pulled out of his hand, not hearing any noises, he just felt him jerked out of his hand. He looked around and he was ten yards away. He saw him get shot with what he thought was the first time, but that was the second time he was shot. The first shot is what knocked him ten yards away; it was right dead center where I would put my stethoscope. There was a classic high-velocity bullet wound with a small entrance hole. This kid, who was a toddler, was missing his entire back and all of his chest organs between his shoulder blades. I saw that twice in the same day.

Ninety percent of the patients were children who would come to the Emergency Room ten or twenty minutes after a bombing; 90% of the patients were children—often three or four on the gurney at the same time. A third would be dead, and a third would be dying, and 10% more would die. All were missing a limb or portions of a limb; all were shredded like paper or burnt like a hot dog that was left ignored on a grill. Because of the paucity of medical supplies deliberately imposed by the Israeli government, we were seeing kids die with 15% body burns. There is no country in the world where a child would die with 15% body burns. Not even in Honduras, where I go [on medical missions], in very austere environments, does a baby die with 15% body burns. Then, for the children with greater degrees of body burns—let’s just say I would lose my medical license if I revealed what we had to do to control their pain.

The second thing that we noticed was there was a lack of journalists. That’s why I’m speaking to you today. To speak to my first point that the population was being targetted, on the way into Gaza, through the open Rafah border, we saw what we thought was a wonderful thing: There were probably two or three miles of two trucks, side by side, waiting to get in as we did. You went through a process where you identified to the Israeli government who you were, what road you were going to be on, how long it was going to take you to get there. If you deviated from that, you were going to get a missile through your windshield.

Deliberate Withholding of Food

We were there when the World Central Kitchen vans were bombed; they had been deconflicted. They each had six or seven people in them, six or seven cell phones, all of which had a positive green dot on it which said that “You have been deconflicted.” We know where you’re at; we can track you with military-grade GPS to within inches. They had seven going on in each van, so when that missile went through the hood of each van, it was deliberate. There was no mistaking who they were and that they were deconflicted and that their entire pathway was tracked out. They never deviated from the same road that we were on, that they were bombed on.

But on the way out of Rafah, through the Rafah crossing from the European-Gaza Hospital, which is only about 15 miles into the country and three miles from the Israeli border, what we saw were not three miles or two miles of trucks side by side—a row of two—we saw 30 miles of trucks. And not two by two, we saw them eight trucks wide, bumper to bumper. They had these really bizarre names on them like CARE, and UNHCR, and OXFAM, and Feed the Children, and multiple UN groups, and the Red Cross, and the Green Crescent. Those that weren’t marked were clearly overburdened with bananas and pineapples and watermelons and potatoes. And all this food was rotting in the sun, because Israel would not let them in because they would not deconflict them.

So, they were deliberately holding water trucks and sanitation equipment and electrical service trucks, and generators, and food supplies, and trucks full of dead chickens. They were deliberately not letting them in, deliberately withholding food and medical aid. Then add to that the deliberate bombing of hospitals and clinics, and the specific targetting of journalists and doctors and nurses, who were clearly victimized and clearly abused and clearly imprisoned inappropriately.

We had patients who were nurses, who had refused to leave the operating room because they were operating on somebody and were shot. One was shot in the knee, just because he refused to abandon a patient he was sewing up. He was taken to Israel with a bullet wound—half of his knee was missing—taken to an Israeli prison. He received no medical care; he was blindfolded, handcuffed, given a juice box a day sometimes, most times every other day. He was dropped at the border on the 45th day of no medical care, maggots coming out of his leg. Picked up after he crawled three kilometers, just over a mile and a half if I guessed right, in the dirt, naked, not seeing where he’s going because his going away present from the Israeli soldier who dropped him off was a rifle butt in his right eye—for which he is now blinded forever. Then I met him when he was brought to the hospital where we were working. So, you have a starved, tortured health care worker who was deliberately targeted. He was clearly not Hamas, because they let him go.

Doctors Forced To Be Journalists

This is a perfect example of the next topic I’m thinking about, and that is that there is a reason why there were no journalists there. That’s because they were also assassinated or imprisoned or had their equipment confiscated. Even Al Jazeera, a respected news agency in the Middle East, they’re not even allowed within the Israeli borders right now. So, when you create a situation where the free press is not allowed in, and the only place the press is allowed to go is where the Israeli government takes them, then the truth will never be known. As we were leaving, we all decided that we had to become the journalists. I’m way out of my normal element speaking to you. This is not where my comfort zone is, but the only way the truth is going to get out is if we say it.

I spoke to CNN, and after I told her what I’ve told you, she said, “Well, we can’t independently confirm that.” And I said, “No shit! That’s the story; that you should be able to confirm this. The fact that you’re not allowed in the country is the problem. And as a journalist, why aren’t you doing back flips protesting that to the Israeli government? You abandoned your responsibility as a journalist.” And when I spoke to the nice people on CBS Sunday Morning, she asked me what the problem was, and I told her, “You are the problem,” to the lady interviewing me, “as a representative of the legacy American media, because you’re protecting me from the truth. You’re not doing the job that I’m trying to do.” She said, “Yeah, but it’s Sunday Morning, we have to be sensitive.” “To what? What better time of the week or hour of the day do you need to tell the truth more than on a Sunday morning?”

So, they put pictures up of the two assassinated children; they were so pixilated it could have been a box of Dunkin Donuts, and nobody would have been able to tell the difference. So, the legacy media is a problem in the United States, largely for the same reasons that our elected officials are similarly the problem. They take money from very wealthy conservative Christian groups and from AIPAC. We don’t have term limits, and that makes people’s desire to get re-elected for money, I think, the problem.

Going back to Gaza, the overwhelming opinion of every doctor who was there, ergo every journalist who was there, was that this is a definitive genocide. Israel has two choices: They have a one-state solution, they have a two-state solution, both of which have failed over decades and decades for the past 75 years. If Israel, and therefore the United States—because they’re our puppet, we are their puppet—if they would have been willing to accept it, it would have happened already. So, if they don’t accept the one-state solution and they don’t accept the two-state solution, their only other choice is to continue the apartheid state that they’ve been promulgating for the last 75 years.

Gaza has been nothing but an open-air prison for 75 years; no different than a super-max prison anywhere else in the world. The people of Gaza were not allowed to control their own electromagnetic space; they can’t control their ocean waters along the coast of Gaza. They go 100 yards out in the Mediterranean, they get shot by a gunboat. It was literally an open-air prison. And if you can’t continue the apartheid for which South Africa was suing them, that leaves only one other choice, and that is genocide. And that is exactly what we witnessed.

Women and Children Are the Target

In conclusion, the Palestinian patients we saw, mostly innocent women and children, most of them that died were not collateral damage in Israel’s hunt for Hamas—the one in 30,000 people in the Gaza Strip who are Hamas fighters. The Palestinian population was not that side effect that was inadvertently hurt; they were the focus of the bombing, they are the target of the IDF. That’s how you carry out a genocide. That’s why the children were targeted; that’s why mosques were targeted; that’s why all the hospitals were burned and closed. The hospital that I was at—they didn’t have to close it; it had a wall around it. The IDF could have put one of my taxpayer-bought Bradley fighting vehicles at each of the four entrances. They could have put somebody quite clearly on the corner of every hallway and on every floor with an Uzi. They could have taken care and secured the hospital and continued to provide health care to the population. But instead, they chose to close it. They could have run metal detectors over people; they could have confiscated their SIM cards, because they’re all Israeli SIM cards. Israel controls the telephone space. They could have searched their contacts; if this was a Hamas fighter, they would have been able to find out. Plus, they had facial recognition on all of them.

So, they could have kept the hospitals open, but they chose not to for the same reason that they bombed a water reservoir and the water purification plants, and the chicken coops, and the museums, and every school. The two medical schools are now gravel underground. The reason why they did that is that they know that the best way to dehumanize the population is to kill the humans. It’s specifically a genocide going on, and our taxpayer dollars are paying for it. That’s why I went to Gaza, because I knew it was 50% children. And I knew that my tax dollars were responsible for killing innocent people. And that’s why I’m going back.