This Is The Most Important Piece I've Ever Reported

During the "ceasefire" in Gaza, volunteer doctors attempt to save as many lives as they can, all while the Israeli genocide continues. Please read this 

Edited by Sam Thielman

LAST MONTH, close readers of FOREVER WARS noticed me referencing a forthcoming piece of journalism that took a two-by-four to my mental health. That piece has just been published. 

"The Ghosts of al-Shifa Hospital" is what I headlined this story. That story emerged from my hours of interviews with Dr. Nahreen Ahmed, Philadelphia lung doctor and an extraordinary person. Ahmed spent November and December at al-Shifa, once the heartbeat of medical care in Gaza, and now one of its few hospitals left standing—barely. She took the picture of al-Shifa above. 

Ahmed's most recent trip to Gaza was her fourth since October 7, 2023. It was her first during the supposed ceasefire declared on October 10, 2025. She and three other health-care volunteers who made the extremely dangerous trip into Gaza since the "ceasefire" told me that now Gaza's beleaguered healthcare system has to deal with both the pace of trauma patients caused by ongoing Israeli assaults and an increased crush of patients who need treatment for injuries sustained by the genocide and for their preexisting or newly developed conditions.

All of this occurs in the context of a continued Israeli stranglehold that permits in some food but vastly fewer medical supplies. You can see this for yourself on a United Nations dashboard. The Israelis permit international doctors to enter Gaza, but often confiscate their equipment. A North Carolina hand surgeon, Mark Perlmutter, told me that the Israelis seized $10,000 worth of his microsurgical instruments. Without them, he could not reconnect people's severed limbs. 

But since the pace of bombardment has slowed, Ahmed told me, the Palestinian doctors (and patients) have the time and space to address another kind of horror. Now they can process what they have lived through. They told Ahmed and the other doctors I interviewed the stories of watching colleagues be murdered practically for sport. They told them about all the people they couldn't save. Some emerge from months of Israeli detention to the astonishment of colleagues who had thought them dead. Those same doctors and nurses look around the emergency room and are struck by the absence of others who, horribly, are. 

These are the ghosts of al-Shifa hospital. 

Thank you to Katie Drummond, editor-in-chief of Wired and my old Danger Room batterymate, for publishing this piece. 

In crafting any story, editors and writers have disagreements. Ultimately they get the final say. But one line that I wrote to honor the scores of Palestinian journalists whom Israel has killed during the genocide ended up getting cut. That line was important to me. Here I want to include the paragraph as I intended for it to appear. 

I cannot see Gaza for myself. Israel has kept foreign reporters out since October 7. Gaza’s journalists told its story better than outsiders like me ever could. Israel killed at least 260 of them for it. “Three of these killings, including one murder, occurred after the October 2025 ceasefire,” the Committee to Protect Journalists noted in a February report that found Israel “has now killed more journalists than any other government” since CPJ began keeping records 34 years ago. And so we outsiders must bear witness to what our braver colleagues died to tell the world. 

When you read this piece, I hope you'll whisper this line to yourself when you come across the paragraph above. 

There is a lot in this story. I consider it the most important I've ever worked on. Those familiar with my catalog can, I hope, appreciate what I'm trying to convey here. This is genocide reporting. And there is even more that I couldn't include in the piece, including interviews I had to exclude for being beyond the scope of this story. Some of them are harrowing and involve the "Gaza Humanitarian Foundation." My intention is to repurpose them for FOREVER WARS once I'm out from the crush of book revisions. 

But I want to leave you with what another doctor I interviewed, Feroze Sidhwa, told me. I could not write this piece without pointing to what it means for Americans to move on from Gaza. 

The declaration of a ceasefire, however one-sided, has prompted many, particularly in the United States, to move on. Sidhwa, the California trauma surgeon, says this “ is a total disaster—it means the Palestinians are going to be destroyed in Gaza.” As Israel’s accomplice, supplying it arms and diplomatic cover during the genocide, the United States is also the only potential check on its behavior. “It’s very dispiriting that we don’t have a political culture or a media culture, or even the moral culture, to recognize that we should care about our own crimes,” Sidhwa says.

MY BRILLIANT FRIEND MOLLY CRABAPPLE wrote an amazing book about the Bund, the socialist Jewish political and social movement in 19th and 20th century eastern Europe. It's called Here Where We Live Is Our Country. This isn't "just" history. Molly is resurrecting an antizionist Jewish political tradition and pointing to what we Jews must reclaim in this era of nightmare. 

Her book will be released on April 7, and you should preorder it at the link above. I'm proud to say that on May 14, the Brooklyn Institute will host a dialogue between Molly, myself and our friend Suzy "Dr. Small Talk" Schneider. You can RSVP here, and I hope to see you for this crucial discussion. 

[Completely unrelatedly and on a much different note, I’m moderating a panel at a comics show called MoCCAFest this weekend. The topic will be The Comics Journal at 50 and the guests will be TCJ's founding editor Gary Groth, Austin English, Sally Madden, and Chris Mautner. If you’re in New York and free on Sunday 3/29 at 1:30, come by Space Two at 133 West 21st Street. Tickets to the show are cheaper in advance ($20) here but it's not pricey even at the door ($25). It’s always a great show and the panel should be terrific.—Sam]