Colorado Sun: A Denver pediatrician in Gaza: “The most dangerous place on Earth to live as a child”
Colorado pediatrician Dr. Mohamed Kuziez poses with Palestinian children he helped care for during volunteer service in Gaza.(Provided by Mohamed Kuziez)
A Denver pediatrician in Gaza: “The most dangerous place on Earth to live as a child”
by Peter Moore. September 18, 2025.
Dr. Mohamed Kuziez, 35, is bragging about one of his favorite patients. “She is fierce,” the Denver pediatrician says, fishing out his phone like a proud dad.
He volunteered in Gaza for three weeks earlier this year, which is why his phone also contains images of decaying corpses in the wreckage of a building, a lineup of torched Palestinian ambulances, and human organs, red and incongruous on surgical sheeting, outside of the bodies they once served. He also photographed a message he scrawled in the dust left on a wall, after a missile struck al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza: “With love from Colorado,” it says.
Finally, Kuziez locates the photo of his 7-year-old patient Habiba, her hair glossy, a smile lighting up her face, and “Hello Kitty” earrings in both ears. Her name means “the little one who is beloved” in Arabic, and she is. When her mom posted about her on Instagram, the king of Jordan interceded on her behalf, asking the Israeli government to release her to his country for treatment.
In the photo Kuziez called up, Habiba’s dark eyes are riveting, so it takes a moment to register that both of her arms have been amputated above the elbow. Her left leg — her only remaining limb — is out of the frame. But to look at that photograph, you’d think “birthday party,” not “humanitarian crisis.”
In December 2023, UNICEF declared Gaza the most dangerous place on Earth to live as a child. Even back then, the United Nations estimated that there were about 130,000 children under age 2 in Gaza who weren’t receiving the food they needed to survive. Last month, a report from the UN sounded the alarm over a half-million Palestinians facing famine; 132,000 of those victims are children.
The UNICEF declaration flipped his switch into action mode. “Once there was a critical mass of 3,000 children killed, I knew I had to act,” Kuziez says. He began applying to medical aid charities, but they were looking for emergency room doctors and surgeons. At the end of 2024 he at last fielded a request for a pediatrician willing to risk his life in Gaza.
Before he left for the Middle East he visited his parents. “When I went into medicine,” he says, “they told me it’s not about how much money you make or how big your house is or how nice your car is. What actually matters is what you have given back to the world.”
After delivering the news to his family, and saying a provisional goodbye, he wrote his will. Then he saw a therapist, to help him prepare emotionally for the task ahead. She acknowledged the difficulties of what he’d be seeing and doing in Gaza, and counseled him to bring tokens of home, for comfort. “I ended up bringing the blanket I covered myself with as a child,” he says, “and a bar of my mom’s favorite soap.”
He would need all that and more.
In a talk he gave at the First Unitarian Society of Denver, Kuziez shared his experiences in January and February while working at the Patient Friends Benevolent Society Hospital in the al-Rimal neighborhood of Gaza City. The images were beyond shocking: The remains of a dialysis center that was targeted by Israeli artillery; a playground plowed under by Israeli tanks; a former fig orchard that now serves as a mass grave; a hospital facade pockmarked with gunfire. He also filmed a wooden donkey cart rolling through a street that had been reduced to rubble.
Dr. Mohamed Kuziez with one of his young patients in Gaza, who holds a sticker of a character from the Disney movie “Frozen.” (Provided by Mohamed Kuziez)
There were also many photographs of children, because they are Kuziez’s touchstone. One video shows three kids bouncing on a trampoline set down amid the rubble. Another shows a young boy swinging like Spider-Man from a severed telephone wire. If you’re a kid in Gaza, anything can be your playground.
“They manage to find joy in the silliest things,” Kuziez says. “It’s amazing. I talked to kids in Gaza who have had their classmates killed. But they don’t say ‘F the Israelis, they did this to us.’ They say: ‘I hope the sky stops raining bombs so we can go out and play.’” One of his young patients begged him for one of the “Frozen” stickers he brought to distract his young patients, saying she needed it for her friend. Later, he spotted it on the friend’s gravestone.
Asked what he takes away from all of this, Kuziez pauses for a few weighty seconds. “Being in Gaza showed me that, sadly, the world does not care about kids the way I do,” he says. “A lot of kids will die before their time. But we have to fight for the ones who are still around.” He pauses again and then shares his personal mission statement: “I have taken on a personal challenge that, regardless of the hour of the day or what the request is, I will always show up for my patients.”
Now, he awaits the call to return to Gaza — soon, he hopes. If the Israeli government lets him in, he will show up for his young patients, like always.
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