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 further 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 recovering 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.”
Professor Nick Maynard in conversation with the Andersonstown News
Prof Maynard was working in the Al-Asqa Hospital in January when Israeli forces forced staff and patients to leave. He was operating on a young woman with chest and abdominal shrapnel injuries when an Israeli missile hit the intensive care unit next to the building that he was operating in. He said the Israelis also use quadcopter drones which come into hospital complexes and shoot healthcare workers.
“Quadcopter drones are remote controlled drones with guns on them," he explained, and the Israelis, through remote control, fly them into hospitals and shoot people."
He added: “There is no doubt in my mind that healthcare workers are being deliberately targeted. There’s no doubt in my mind that the hospitals are being deliberately targeted and dismantled and I witnessed it with my own eyes. The hospitals are being destroyed and healthcare workers are being targeted.
“I think the end game for the Israelis – I know they say it’s all about destroying Hamas – but I think they are deliberately dismantling the whole infrastructure of life in Gaza, particularly the healthcare system.
“When you destroy the hospital then people leave. When there is a functioning hospital, refugees go there as a place of sanctuary and the 1.7 million of the population that has been displaced, they collect around hospitals when they can. If the hospital is destroyed, they will leave and they will go somewhere else, so it’s part of the exercise of displacing them progressively towards the south. I think they’ve been targeting health care workers because that is part of the destruction of the healthcare system and I think if they target – and they have targeted some very senior doctors, some of whom I knew well – I think that is all part of the dismantling of the whole infrastructure of society there to make it unliveable.
'We often had no drugs, no surgical products. Colleagues had to operate on patients with the lights of their mobile phones.'
— Trócaire (@trocaire) July 24, 2024
Surgeon @maynard_nick who has been volunteering in Gaza's hospitals speaking in Dublin tonight about his experiences and the need for urgent political… pic.twitter.com/4gDB0mTCcr
“Over 500 (healthcare workers) have been killed and to my knowledge several hundred have been abducted and imprisoned and have been tortured. There are 36 hospitals in Gaza. There is not a single hospital functioning normally.”
Prof Maynard described Gazans as a “very special people”.
“They have been living effectively in a large prison for the last 18 years and they are in desperate need of people going in to help them. I have a huge need to go back in and help them but it’s a great love I have for the people and the country which is the major factor.”
He said the official figure of 39,000 people having died during the Israeli onslaught is made up of "people dying immediately from war trauma who are identified”.
“It doesn’t include people who died two weeks later from their wounds,” he added. “It doesn’t include people who were left buried under the rubble who we believe there are many, many thousands, including friends of mine.
“It doesn’t include all the excess death. We became very familiar with the term ‘excess death’ during Covid – those people dying of other diseases other than Covid. The Lancet (medical journal) the other day predicted that there are probably in the region of 186,000 excess deaths in Gaza and that’s eight per cent of the population. So, it is very likely that eight per cent of the population has been killed.
“The psychological and psychiatric support is completely unfathomable now. It’s actually difficult to imagine anyone not needing it to be honest. And the latest figure I heard is that there are over a million children in need of urgent psychological support, which beggars’ belief.”