AN English doctor who has travelled to Gaza twice since October 7 volunteering his life-saving skills in hospitals in the region, has said that healthcare workers are being "deliberately targeted" by Israeli forces. Professor Nick Maynard is a consultant gastrointestinal surgeon at Oxford University Hospital in England and has been visiting Gaza at least once a year since 2010. He was in Ireland this week at the invitation of Trócaire to give a series of talks on his experience of working on the ground in Gaza amid an unimaginable humanitarian crisis. Prof Maynard works with Trócaire’s partner organisation Medical Aid for Palestinians. Sitting down with the Andersonstown News ahead of a talk in the Linenhall Library, Prof Maynard said the situation was “desperate” when he was in Gaza in January this year, but conditions on the ground had deteriorated when he was last there in May. “The amount of people who have been displaced is just huge now,” he said. “When I was there in January driving through Al-Mawasi it was largely empty. Driving through Al-Mawasi two months ago it was awful. There are hundreds of thousands of people there in make-shift tents. There is nothing in Al-Mawasi, there is no running water, there are no resources at all and they’ve all been displaced and forced to live there. “And of course Al-Mawasi is now being bombed by the Israelis, a so-called safe area.” The 61-year-old said malnutrition was now hindering people recovery from their war wounds. “Young people are dying as a result of malnutrition and not being able to cope with their war injuries,” he said. “And all that is getting worse. The escalation – even in recent weeks – the bombardment of the camps at the Al-Asqa Hospital where I spent four weeks, they’ve been bombing the tents around the hospital, they are forcing them to evacuate from there now, it’s getting worse.”
