Doctors Without Morals
Dr. Faroze Sidhwa has been widely praised for his work as a surgeon in Gaza. Yet in a recent campus talk, he voiced assertions about Israel and Hamas that are contested, incomplete, or unsupported.
Connecticut College held the 17th session of its “Understanding Israel/Palestine” webinar series on April 29, marking the final installment for this academic year. The featured speaker was Sidhwa.
Sidhwa deserves admiration for what he has done in Gaza. He has worked as a surgeon in a hospital in the center of a dangerous war zone and healed Gaza’s citizens, including many innocent children.
But Sidhwa has chosen to denigrate Israel, while nearly absolving Hamas of any responsibility for the events on or after October 7, 2023. His remarks included claims that are disputed or unverified, along with rhetoric that critics would regard as crossing into antisemitic framing.
As has been the norm in prior webinars in this series, the faculty moderator did not ask any questions that challenged the accuracy of Sidhwa’s claims. Indeed, she amplified many of his falsehoods and interjected more of her own.
Consider several of his claims.
Sidhwa rose to prominence when an article he wrote was published by the New York Times. He compiled reports from 65 doctors, nurses and paramedics about the conditions and injuries treated in Gaza’s hospitals. In the article and in his talk, he accused the Israeli army of intentionally shooting children in the head. But this accusation has been discredited, and Hamas itself has an established record of targeting and shooting children.
Sidhwa repeated the accusation of genocide regarding Israel’s actions in Gaza. As I have written, the legal definition of genocide requires the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a people. While the loss of civilian life is tragic, there is no evidence of attacks by Israel that intentionally targeted civilians. There is much counterevidence to the charge, including, as Sidhwa himself mentioned, Israel providing evacuation notices to civilians so that they can depart from targeted areas.
Sidhwa went further and claimed that Israel has intentionally targeted the top doctors at hospitals, and that it operated “torture camps” for those it imprisoned. But there is no evidence of any such intention, nor did he mention that many doctors in Gaza hospitals have been involved in terrorist activities. Meanwhile, the Israeli government’s position is that all prisoners are treated in conformance with international law, and there is a history of Palestinian prisoners, convicted of terror offenses, having access to Halal food, educational opportunities, and family and Red Cross visits. The notion of torture camps arose because of a report by B’Tselem, an Israeli peace activist organization. But B’Tselem has a history and a mission of demonizing Israel. It receives its funding from organizations hostile to Israel and cannot be relied on as a reliable source of information.
Sidhwa claimed that the actions he alleged of Israeli soldiers were understandable because then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant had issued a statement that absolved Israeli soldiers of responsibility for their actions in Gaza. But that claim has been debunked. Fact-checking organizations, including USA Today and Radio Free Asia (AFCL), found no evidence that Gallant made such a statement.
He claimed there were no restrictions placed by Hamas on his personal reporting from Gaza. It is impossible to verify that claim. But on the same day Sidhwa presented, it was reported that Hamas arrested and tortured journalists for reporting on rape and sexual assaults of children it committed. It has been widely reported that Hamas places strict controls on all reporting from Gaza. For example, in November 2023, a reporter from Al Jazeera was forced to stop filming when a patient told him that Hamas terrorists were hiding among the patients. It’s true that once Sidhwa left Gaza he might have felt more freedom to speak the truth. But he plans to go back to Gaza – as he suggested – he must be careful what he says outside Gaza.
A related point concerns his characterization of media coverage. Sidhwa said that there was little compassion for the deaths of Palestinian civilians. He compared the story of Hersh Goldberg-Polin to that of a Palestinian student who died on the same day that Hersh was murdered by Hamas. Hersh has received extensive media coverage, in part because of the advocacy by his parents. Yet this student’s fate was barely reported. This comparison is accurate, but it ignores the larger context. Mainstream media sources, for example, have relied on casualty reporting from Hamas (euphemistically referred to as the Gaza Health Ministry), which have been shown to be consistently exaggerated. The New York Times has faced criticism for its anti-Israel bias in its coverage of the war in Gaza. More importantly, major media regularly ran sympathy pieces on the suffering in Gaza, and rarely reported on the suffering in Israel – from relentless missiles and terrorist attacks. He may be right about that one case, but it misrepresents the broader pattern.
Sidhwa also addressed Hamas’s tactics, where his account diverged sharply from widely reported evidence. He claimed that there was “absolutely no evidence whatsoever” that Hamas was using civilians as human shields. “Nobody has ever seen this,” he said, and that reports of human shields were “always shown to be incorrect.” But Hamas military chief Mohammed Sinwar (the brother of Yahya Sinwar) was killed in an underground tunnel beneath the European Hospital in Khan Younis, southern Gaza. That is the same hospital where Sidhwa worked. The tunnel was reported to contain a command-and-control compound. It was struck on May 13, 2025, and Sinwar’s body was later recovered. Even the New York Times has acknowledged that there were tunnels beneath the Al-Shifa hospital, and it confirmed the existence of tunnels under the European Hospital.
His presence coincided with Hamas’s use of civilian infrastructure, making him a human shield.
He claimed he had free rein over the hospital. Did he simply not bother to look for any tunnels that essentially turned the entire hospital into a human shield? Or was he fully aware of the tunnel but chose not to disclose it?
Sidhwa’s defamatory libels about genocide, journalism, casualty reporting and human shields are unforgivable. But his most egregious lies were about the nature of Hamas. He referred to it as a “nationalist militia fighting for national survival” and said its efforts were similar to those of George Washington during the American Revolution. “It makes its own weapons and is not a threat to Israel or anyone else,” he said. “It is just trying to achieve a nationalist agenda in an ugly way.”
The comparison defies credulity and overlooks Hamas’s stated ideology and record. Hamas is an Islamist terrorist organization, and its mission (as stated in its charter) is to eliminate Israel. It is not “fighting for survival”; it is fighting to kill Jews. It is dependent on Iran for funding, training and for its supply of weapons.
Sidhwa’s rhetoric was antisemitic. He compared the Israelis to Nazis and accused Israel of “ethnic supremacy” and “racism.” His Twitter feed contains no postings that are sympathetic to the deaths, rapes, beheadings and other crimes committed by Hamas on October 7. But he posts on a near-daily basis to criticize the actions of Israel and the US in the Middle East. This double standard, along with his other rhetoric, meet the IHRA definition of antisemitism.
Taken together, these statements form a broader pattern. Sidhwa has chosen to follow a path of spreading defamatory lies. Not only does this undermine his credibility, but it also diminishes the courage and compassion he would otherwise deserve as a medical practitioner. Sidhwa would be a hero if he advocated for the health of Gaza’s civilians without engaging in lies and political activism. Instead, he is a doctor who saved lives, but whose moral compass is broken – and who has become another apologist for the Islamist genocidal terrorist group.
I have referred to these webinars as the “hate series.” Sidhwa’s presentation exemplified that description.
Connecticut College’s students deserve accuracy, not advocacy. They should not be subjected to one-sided, libelous and antisemitic presentations that are devoid of critical inquiry.
If the faculty of an educational institution were running webinars that targeted people of color or the gay community, they would not be tolerated. But Connecticut College’s leadership allows these webinars that target Jews to continue.
Let’s hope that the next academic year brings an end to this embarrassing hate series.