CAIRO — Feroze Sidhwa, an American trauma surgeon based in California, had already traveled twice to the Gaza Strip to treat Palestinians wounded by war. He’d seen the horrific injuries, the children maimed, and survived an Israeli airstrike that killed one of his patients earlier this year.
Afterward, he spoke openly about what he saw in Gaza, including in testimony to the U.N. Security Council in May. When he returned to the region for another mission last month, Israel barred Sidhwa from reentering the territory, where he had planned to perform complex surgeries on injured Palestinians and teach local doctors newer and safer techniques so they could carry out the operations themselves.
Sidhwa, 43, says he doesn’t know if his public testimony about the war factored into Israel’s decision; no reason was given for the denial and Israeli officials did not respond to requests for comment. But he is one of four American health professionals, including three doctors and a nurse, and dozens more foreign medical workers who have been prevented from crossing into Gaza in recent weeks. Their denials come despite a U.S.-backed ceasefire that promised a surge in humanitarian assistance and as tens of thousands of Palestinians still suffer from life-changing wounds. Gaza’s crippled health system badly needs international support, doctors and aid officials say.
International medical volunteers have been rotating in and out of Gaza on short-term missions, coordinated by the World Health Organization, since January 2024. While inside, they have lent labor power to overwhelmed hospitals and clinics, performed complicated surgeries and helped train Gaza’s medical workers and set up field hospitals. As of early October, they’d performed more than 3.5 million medical consultations and more than 50,000 emergency surgeries, according to the WHO.
But each attempt to get into Gaza is a gamble and this year, before the ceasefire began on Oct. 10, Israel denied entry to more than a third of those who’d made it through a preapproval process on average, according to a U.N. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
The rejection rate has dropped since then, the U.N. official said — and the number of doctors and nurses the WHO is able to bring into Gaza each week has more than doubled. Still, about 20 percent of those seeking to volunteer in Gaza are turned away last-minute, the official said.
COGAT, the branch of the Israeli military that controls who and what enters and exits Gaza, did not respond to requests for comment on the denials more broadly. It referred questions on Sidhwa’s case to Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security agency. A Shin Bet spokesperson did not respond to a Post query, and a spokesman for the Israeli prime minister’s office, which oversees the Shin Bet, also did not comment.
Sidhwa said he was notified just after midnight on Nov. 13, a few hours before he was scheduled to leave for Gaza from the Jordanian capital, Amman, that his name was not on the list of foreigners approved by Israeli authorities to enter.
During this mission, he had intended to focus on reversing colostomies, a temporary procedure undertaken to treat severe abdominal injuries that requires a follow-up surgery some months later to restore normal bowel function. Thousands of Gazans are estimated to need colostomy reversals, according to Khaled al-Serr, a surgeon at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis.
Because of Sidhwa’s experience with this particular procedure, he would be “very helpful in participating in surgeries and also in training the local team,” Serr said.
After two weeks in Jordan, waiting and hoping Israeli officials would reverse the decision, Sidhwa flew to Tel Aviv on Wednesday ahead of talks he is scheduled to give at two Israeli universities. Airport authorities let him into the country without any problems, he said.
John Kahler, a pediatrician and co-founder of MedGlobal, a Chicago-based nonprofit, was also denied entry to Gaza twice over the past week and a half. He had planned to assess the needs of the thousands of child amputees, to help set up a new rehabilitation project, he said.
Israeli authorities don’t typically provide a reason for the rejections and there does not appear to be a clear pattern to the profiles of those turned away. The Washington Post spoke with doctors and nurses of different nationalities, religious backgrounds, genders, ages, organizations and specialties.
Some have spoken out about what they experienced in Gaza, where an independent U.N. commission said Israel’s actions amounted to genocide. The commission’s report included testimony from Sidhwa and other American health care workers that was published in the New York Times.
With international journalists and investigators barred by Israel from entering the territory since the war began in 2023, foreign doctors have served as key outside witnesses to the injuries, death and destruction caused by the Israeli offensive, which has leveled most of the enclave and killed more than 70,000 people, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
The ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but says the majority of the dead are women and children — an assertion supported by testimonies from international medical personnel.
Victoria Rose, a British plastic surgeon who has been to Gaza three times during the war, was rejected for the third time last week. After the first rejection, in February, British officials pressed Israel to justify the decision, she said. Israeli officials initially claimed it was a paperwork error, then said that Rose and the other doctors posed a security risk.
But in May, they let Rose into Gaza for another mission. And in a New York Times profile over the summer, Rose described treating victims of mass casualty events linked to a controversial U.S.-backed aid initiative. She was rejected again in October.
“I definitely think the denials are due to the fact that we’ve spoken out,” she said.
But Nor Rizek, a registered nurse from Arizona, said she has not engaged in much advocacy and is not very active on social media. She was prevented from entering Gaza last month.
“There’s no rhyme or reason,” said Rizek, who had already been to Gaza once, in early January, when she worked in an emergency room in the north. She remembers having to tell a mother, cradling her baby’s brains, that her child was gone.
Rizek worked overtime in recent months to save money for a second tour in Gaza so she could relieve her beleaguered Palestinian colleagues, many of whom are displaced and have lost relatives and homes.
“These people have been exhausted, drained and physically and mentally beat for the past two years,” Rizek said. “So allowing in foreign nurses and doctors, the few of us who are allowed in, doesn’t even scratch the surface.”
After coming under repeated Israeli attack, only 18 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals remain partially functional, the WHO says — and more than 1,700 health workers have been killed.
When foreign health workers are denied entry, “the impact is significant for every single rotation because the system is just so overwhelmed,” said Joseph Belliveau, executive director of MedGlobal.
There are no local plastic surgeons left in Gaza, Rose said — so during the mission she was supposed to begin last week, she planned to tackle a backlog of surgeries for war wounded.
Mohammad Subeh, an American emergency room physician in the Bay Area, was also denied entry last week. He’d planned to help out at a Gaza City field hospital that is receiving hundreds of patients daily, he said. While Israeli attacks have decreased during the ceasefire, they have not stopped — so there are still trauma patients in need of emergency care, Subeh said, as well as people with kidney or heart disease, diarrheal illness and postoperative wound infections.
Sidhwa is considering taking his case to Israel’s Supreme Court in the new year. Challenging a rejection can be costly and complicated, he said. While some rejected medical workers were able to get clearance for subsequent missions, other appeals have been stuck in bureaucratic limbo for months, according to Yotam Ben-Hillel, an Israeli lawyer representing about a dozen such clients, including Sidhwa.
The United States has signaled it intends to take a more active role in the coordination of humanitarian assistance to the Gaza Strip, through the Civil-Military Coordination Center it set up in Israel in October. But aid groups have said in recent weeks that the center has yet to take over, leaving COGAT in charge.
When asked about Israel denying entry to some American and international health workers, Navy Capt. Tim Hawkins, spokesman for the U.S. Central Command, which oversees the center, declined to comment.
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