AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

The United Nations has released a report that Israel carried out genocidal acts by systematically attacking and destroying sexual and reproductive healthcare facilities in Gaza, including a fertility center, maternity wards, maternity hospitals, and preventing access to necessary medicines and equipment to ensure safe pregnancies, deliveries and neonatal care.

The Geneva-based Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel said, quote, “Israeli authorities have destroyed in part the reproductive capacity of the Palestinians in Gaza as a group, including by imposing measures intended to prevent births,” unquote.

The report describes Israel’s shelling of the Al-Basma IVF Center in Gaza City in December 2023, that destroyed 4,000 embryos, as intentional and, quote, “a measure intended to prevent births among Palestinians in Gaza, which is a genocidal act under the Rome Statute and the Genocide Convention,” unquote.

Describing the harm to pregnant, lactating and new mothers as “unprecedented,” the commission said Israeli security forces, quote, “deliberately inflicted conditions of life … calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza as a group, … [one of the] categories of genocidal acts in the Rome Statute and the Genocide Convention,” unquote.

The U.N. report also accuses Israel’s security forces of using forced public stripping and sexual assault as part of their standard operating procedures to punish Palestinians since the beginning of the war.

Israel’s Permanent Mission to the U.N. in Geneva rejected the allegations in the report as unfounded and biased.

For more on the attack on Gaza’s fragile healthcare system, and as Israel’s total blockade of the Gaza Strip enters its 12th day, with no food, medicine or fuel allowed in, we go now to Gaza, where we’re joined by two volunteer doctors. Dr. Feroze Sidhwa is a trauma surgeon volunteering at Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, Gaza, with MedGlobal. He is usually based in California. And Dr. Mark Perlmutter is an orthopedics hand surgery specialist volunteering also at Nasser Medical Complex, with the charity Humanity Auxilium. Last year, they both volunteered at the European Hospital in Khan Younis during Israel’s active assault on Gaza.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, let’s begin with you. You’ve just heard this breaking news of the U.N. report calling Israel guilty of genocidal acts, particularly targeting maternity hospitals, the IVF clinic and, overall, the healthcare system in Gaza. If you can respond to, coming back to Gaza now, how you found the hospital, and your response to what they’ve found?

DR. FEROZE SIDHWA: Yes, the hospital in Gaza is — we’re at Nasser Medical Complex on the western side of Khan Younis, and it’s certainly better than when we were at European Hospital last year. The whole hospital isn’t full of refugees and displaced people, so there’s some — the hospital can actually function.

But this hospital was actually attacked in February and March of last year. The dialysis ward was destroyed. A lot of equipment for new operating rooms was destroyed. And right now the blockade is really affecting the availability of instruments and disposables in the operating room, and it’s making life very difficult for people here.

You know, beyond the healthcare system, the prices in the market are going up again. The availability of certain types of food is going down. Meat and other proteins are very hard to come by now. Eggs are about a dollar apiece in the market just outside the hospital that I saw yesterday. So, it’s a very difficult situation. And the attacks on the healthcare system that were done in the past 16 months have really undermined its ability to help people.

AMY GOODMAN: And can you talk about the Israeli energy minister just cutting off electricity to Gaza?

DR. FEROZE SIDHWA: It hasn’t been an obvious problem in the hospital, because we have a generator. But the electricity is now clicking on and off, I don’t know, three times a day, four times a day, whereas before it was not doing that. So, yeah, no, cutting off electricity to a whole population captive in an open-air prison is going to have —

AMY GOODMAN: It looks like we just lost the video to Gaza, to Khan Younis. It’s remarkable that we were even able to make that connection. …

We just reconnected with Gaza — we’ll see how long we can keep them on — to return to our conversation with two American doctors who are volunteering at hospitals in Khan Younis. This is now the 12th day since Israel has completely blockaded the Strip, cutting off all food, medicine and fuel.

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa and Dr. Mark Perlmutter, welcome back to Democracy Now! Dr. Perlmutter, we last spoke to you in North Carolina after you had returned from Gaza. You are back. Can you talk about what’s happening, and particularly about the medical staff, the doctors, the nurses, the staff, those, for example, who have been arrested by Israel, even one, I understand, who you’ve talked to, who was recently released?

DR. MARK PERLMUTTER: Right. I have a colleague, an orthopedic surgeon, specializes in pediatric orthopedics, who was abducted from the hospital, from the operating room, in February of 2024. He was just released. When he was arrested, he was strip-searched, marched naked in front of his colleagues, beaten on a daily basis in an Israeli prison, beaten more intensely when he asked to speak to a lawyer, and even more intensely after he spoke to his lawyer. He had his fingers broken and his hand. He had, while handcuffs on, guards step on the handcuffs to torque them into the nerves of his hand, ruining the nerves in his operative hands.

And if the physical daily beatings and the loss of his hand function wasn’t enough, the psychologic torture, which is their specialty, according to almost everybody who’s been released — and there are still approximately 350 healthcare workers in Israeli prisons, all without charges — the psychologic torture is immense. They showed him photographs, surveillance photographs, of his wife, and said, “We will bring her here and gang rape her in front of you if you don’t admit that you’re Hamas,” which is what their request was when they were breaking individual finger bones. And then they showed him a GPS photo of his house and said that they would send a drone through his bedroom window, killing his wife and kids, if he didn’t admit that he was Hamas. So, the physical and mental torture, which is supported by many healthcare workers that were released, and is still obviously going on in Israeli prisons, presents a tremendous weight on the healthcare system here.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Mark Perlmutter, you are a Jewish American. You are urging him, this orthopedic surgeon, to sue American Israeli — you know, American IDF soldiers in a civil suit, making them personally financially responsible for what has taken place? Again, you are also currently president of the World Surgical Foundation, immediate past president of the International College of Surgeons. A civil lawsuit?

DR. MARK PERLMUTTER: Well, it’s something that’s developing now. You know, we’ve all been to D.C. and spoke to our feckless senators and congressmen. We find them — I personally find them to be spineless and, along with our past two presidents, directly responsible for the carnage that we’ve witnessed here. I think soon that American 2,000-pound bombs will be dropping here again when the ceasefire ends. And Israel has ruined every ceasefire that has ever been declared in their history with Palestine. And I think that when that carnage restarts, decades from now, history will remember especially our past two presidents and our current spineless Senate and Congress as the murderers that they truly are by not having the guts to stand up to Israel.

And it’s not an anti-Jewish stance. It’s an anti-Zionism stance that they need to take. And every time somebody protests in favor of a Palestinian, just like this story that you just broadcast, it’s interpreted as an antisemitic stance and not an anti-Zionism stance. And the two are completely different. In fact, Zionism is the major cause for the destruction of Judaism.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Sidhwa, you’re meeting with the U.N. secretary-general and demanding to know or pushing for information on where Dr. Abu Safiya is, the head of the Kamal Adwan pediatric hospital?

DR. FEROZE SIDHWA: Yes. Dr. Abu Safiya was taken after Kamal Adwan had been laid siege to for 80 or 90 days. The entire hospital has been completely destroyed at this point. And yeah, he’s just a pediatrician, nothing special about him. He was actually taken by the Israelis earlier in the war and let go, precisely because he’s not a threat to anybody. But then they decided to arrest him again, decided to torment him, as well, just like they have with so many others.

But yes, we were able to meet with António Guterres, the secretary-general of the U.N., as well as Tom Fletcher, the under-secretary-general for OCHA. And Secretary-General Guterres is very interested in the case. He had asked Mr. Fletcher to look into it, which he did. Mr. Fletcher raised the issue with the Israelis, met with Dr. Abu Safiya’s family, quite publicly, actually. And still no word on Dr. Abu Safiya’s release date. The Israelis keep pushing back his court dates and things like that. But we’re very much hoping that he will be released soon. This territory needs every doctor, every nurse that it can possibly muster.

It’s true that the bombs have stopped falling, and most of the shooting has stopped. The Israelis are still killing about half a dozen people a day, but the bombing has, thank God, stopped for the most part. But everyone here is still homeless. Everyone here is still hungry. Everyone here is still thirsty. And as you mentioned at the beginning of the hour, the Israelis have cut off all entry and exit to Gaza again. This is — you’ve got 1.8, 1.9, 2 million people locked in a cage, and they can’t access anything from the outside world. They can’t survive like this.

People are turning on each other here. Palestinian society is very communal and very — there’s a lot of solidarity in it, but there’s limits to everything. Just last night, we actually had a mass shooting between two different families. Over what? Who knows? But people are just at their breaking point with the necessities of life just being unavailable, not for a week or a month or a year, but for 16 months now. It has to end. And what the United States is doing about this is just shameful. It’s backing Israel all the way. And it’s got to stop. It’s got to stop.

AMY GOODMAN: And the complete cutting off of aid now into Gaza, which has been condemned by humanitarian groups around the world, Dr. Sidhwa?

DR. FEROZE SIDHWA: Yeah. I mean, you know, like, I’m here with MedGlobal. It’s a group that brings doctors in. But even though I was able to get in, half of my own group was denied entry. So, only two out of the five doctors that were scheduled to come are here now. Dr. Mark Perlmutter, your hand surgery colleague was also denied entry. It’s just — you know, what is being allowed in and not being allowed in, who is being allowed in and not allowed in, it just seems to be —

DR. MARK PERLMUTTER: Arbitrary.

DR. FEROZE SIDHWA: — completely random and arbitrary. And it’s wreaking havoc on the whole society. I mean, again, the whole — people can’t survive with nothing. That’s not how human life works. And the United States needs to stop backing this insane isolation of 2 million people, half of whom are children, most of whom are refugees, that didn’t do anything to anybody. Just stop treating them this way.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both for being with us, Dr. Feroze Sidhwa and Dr. Mark Perlmutter, both U.S.-based surgeons back in Gaza to volunteer. They’re currently volunteering at the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis. To see Dr. Sidhwa’s op-ed in The New York Times, we’ll link to it at democracynow.org.