Welcome

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa is a general, trauma, and critical care surgeon in California. He is also a humanitarian surgeon, having worked most extensively in Palestine, but also in Ukraine, Haiti, Zimbabwe, and Burkina Faso. He most recently volunteered at the European Hospital in Khan Younis, Gaza from March 25-April 8, 2024 with the World Health Organization, and again from March 3-April 1, 2025 with American NGO MedGlobal. Feroze has written and spoken extensively about surgical humanitarian work, the United States’ role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the political consequences of medical relief work. He approaches the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a secular American and as a humanitarian physician.

Feroze can be contacted using the form below, or followed on Twitter/X @FerozeSidhwa and Instagram/Threads @FSidhwa.

Bio

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa is a general, trauma, and critical care surgeon in California. He is triple-board certified in general surgery, trauma/surgical critical care, and neurocritical care, and is a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons and of the International College of Surgeons.

Feroze is also a humanitarian surgeon. He has worked most extensively in Palestine, but has also worked in Ukraine three times with the International Medical Corps and Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, and in Zimbabwe, Haiti, Dominican Republic, and Burkina Faso. He has helped edit books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict published by University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), O/R Books (London, UK), and the Institute for Palestine Studies (Washington, DC). He is widely published in the medical literature, including in The Journal of the American College of Surgeons, Annals of Surgery, World Journal of Surgery, Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, Surgical Infections, Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, JAMA Pediatrics, Journal of Pediatric Surgery, and Journal of Laproendoscopic and Advanced Surgical Techniques, among others. Feroze has spoken on humanitarian relief work and its political implications at the Harvard FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine, as the keynote speaker of the Stanford 31st Annual Trauma Critical Care Symposium, at UChicago Medicine Trauma Grand Rounds, at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, University of Chicago Law School, Johns Hopkins University and School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, MIT, Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, SUNY Downstate College of Medicine, NYU, the Hawaii Medical Association, and the University of Hawaii A. John Burns School of Medicine. He has also spoken widely in the community, mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area but also with Jewish Voice for Peace Phoenix and Tucson, Massachusetts Peace Action, the 2024 Democratic National Convention, and elsewhere.

Lay publications about Feroze’s humanitarian surgical work and its political implications include:

Feroze is the primary author of two open letters to the Biden-Harris administration regarding the United States’ role in the Israeli assault on Gaza that followed the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel, as well as the appendices accompanying those letters. These letters were updated and sent to the Trump transition team on November 15, 2024.

Feroze has appeared on CNN’s Amanpour, PBS, MSNBC’s Ayman Mohyeldin Reports, Democracy Now!, CNN international, the Australia Broadcasting Corporation, DropSite News, NPR, and the BBC World News, as well as a variety of radio programs and podcasts. He has been quoted widely in mainstream and alternative media, including on CBS Sunday Morning News, ABC News, Reuters, the Washington Post, Mother Jones, the New Republic, Mainchi Newspaper (Japan), Local Call (Israel), the Huffington Post, the New Statesman, NRK (Norway), the Guardian, the Independent, Pass Blue, and Democracy Now! Dr. Sidhwa serves as a peer reviewer for the Journal of the American College of Surgeons on global surgical topics and as an external expert reviewer for Human Rights Watch.

Feroze was born in Houston, TX to Parsi parents who left Pakistan to find a better life. They moved to the UK and then in the United States. Feroze grew up in Flint, MI. After graduating from Johns Hopkins University in 2004 with a bachelor’s degree in public health he lived in Haifa, Israel for one year, working with a Palestinian-Jewish cooperative in the city. He then taught middle school in east Baltimore for one year before starting medical school at the University of Texas School of Medicine at San Antonio. During his time in medical school he also obtained a Master of Public Health from the Harvard School of Public Health.

After finishing medical school, Feroze joined the general surgery residency program at Boston Medical Center. During his residency he completed a surgical research fellowship at Boston Children’s Hospital. During that time Feroze treated victims of the Boston Marathon Bombing. After finishing residency in 2018 he began his one-year trauma/surgical critical care fellowship at Cooper University Healthcare in Camden, NJ. After completing his fellowship, he moved to California where he now practices as a trauma surgeon at a county hospital and as a general surgeon in the Veterans Affairs Northern California Health Care System.

Dr. Sidhwa critiques the United States’ role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through a unique lens. He is a secular American with no ethnic or religious ties to the Middle East. He has a broad knowledge of Israeli and American academic work on the conflict, and closely follows the technical humanitarian, human rights, medical, political, economic, and environmental research done on the topic by Israeli, Palestinian, and international agencies. His public health degrees afford him a broad understanding of how these different areas affect the people of the region. He has no interest in any particular political solution to the conflict. And, most importantly to him, he has seen the conflict in person, seen what it is doing to Palestinians and to Israelis, and has treated its victims with his own hands.