An English surgeon who has worked in hospitals in Gaza has said healthcare professionals who have seen the “horrific” injuries inflicted on Palestinians must speak up.
Professor Nick Maynard also warned Palestinian deaths from malnourishment and lack of healthcare could “dwarf” those injured in Israeli strikes.
He said he wants to meet with UK and Irish politicians to speak about traumatic injuries suffered by Gazans.
The 61-year-old consultant gastrointestinal surgeon at Oxford University Hospital has travelled to the Palestinian enclave regularly since 2010 with Medical Aid for Palestinians to provide medical training.
Since Israel’s military operation was launched in the Gaza Strip in response to the October 7 attack by Hamas militants, he has travelled there twice to treat what he called “indescribably awful” injuries.
He said while working there in January, he emerged from a theatre room in the Al-Asqa hospital, after operating on a young woman for five hours, to find a hole in the wall of the intensive care unit after a missile strike.
He said no-one was injured in the strike but they had been told the hospital was in a “deconflicted zone”.
He described the scenes in Gaza hospitals as “chaotic” and that the vast majority of patients are women and children.
He said he can still remember the screams of an orphaned Palestinian girl whose leg was severely broken and needed to be reset without any pain relief.
He told the PA news agency: “I’ll never forget one child whose face was burned so badly that you could see the facial bones through the burnt flesh. She had no chance of survival and she died a very slow death.
“We saw large numbers of traumatic amputations, children coming in with one, two, sometimes three limbs amputated by the bombs.”
Prof Maynard said he wants to meet with UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, Foreign Secretary David Lammy and any Irish politicians so he can show them images of the types of traumatic scenes he has witnessed.
“If I could meet Lammy and Starmer I would,” he said. “Do I believe it’ll make any difference? I’ve no idea… but if I had the opportunity I would do that.
“I’d love to meet Irish politicians if I had the opportunity to do so. In reality it’s only the US government who can stop them (Israel), but the Irish Government, the UK Government could put pressure on the US government, I’m quite sure of that.”
He said Gaza had been “failed” by academic and medical institutions in the UK and called for them to allow vigils to be held in hospitals to remember healthcare staff who had been killed in Gaza.
He said a young Palestinian doctor that he knew, Maisara, who had received a scholarship in the UK, was killed in Gaza when his family home was bombed, with his parents and his sister also killed.
“I think the medical institutions, the academic institutions should provide far more support to their employees and their students who are protesting and standing up for the Gazans,” Prof Maynard said.
The professor, whose wife Fionnuala is from Kinsale in Co Cork, has been addressing gatherings in Cork, Belfast and Dublin this week, working with Irish charity Trocaire, to raise awareness of what is happening in Gaza.
He recalled: “I remember a brother and sister Ala and Aya, he was I think six, she was eight. They were brought in on a day when there was terrible bombings in the local camps that were close to the hospital.
“I saw this little boy on the ground by himself. I subsequently found out his parents had been killed by the bomb.
“I saw him, he was looking desperately ill, terrible burns. But the first thing I noticed was a big hole in the side of his chest. You could see the air being sucked in and out and that can be rapidly fatal.
“I picked him up and we took him into the resuscitation room and stabilised him. He was still very, very sick and to this day, I don’t know whether he survived.
“His sister was there as well and she had a less severe injury, she had a very badly broken leg, which was so displaced that the blood wasn’t able to get down to the foot. In those circumstances, you have to straighten the leg urgently in order to open up the blood vessels. This was a day when we had no morphine, no pain relief.
“The orthopaedic doctor had to come and straighten her leg with no pain relief at all and I can hear it now, talking to you, the memory of her screams were just awful.”
Asked whether more doctors and medical professionals should speak out about the injuries being inflicted on Gazans and in other conflicts, he said: “I think they should be far more outspoken.
“I think there’s a great strength in me as a healthcare professional, as a surgeon who has been on the ground, bearing witness to these appalling acts and describing what I see.
“I try and steer away from the politics because I think it’s more powerful to describe everything you’ve seen, but of course, they’re inextricably linked so you can’t stray away completely, but I strive to make sure the focus of what I say is recounting the atrocities from a humanitarian perspective, from a medical perspective.
“But I do believe that anyone who’s witnessed these things must speak out about them.”
He said during his recent visit several months ago, what stood out to him was how malnourishment caused by Israel limiting food into the region is causing excess deaths.
Prof Maynard said: “The terrible effects of malnutrition, particularly on patients who have had bomb injuries and needed surgery, because they’re malnourished, their tissues don’t heal. They get terrible infections and literally, their bodies fall to pieces.
“The abdominal wounds fall to pieces, their bowels leak, they’re leaking faeces from the shrapnel holes and young people who would normally be expected to survive these injuries die because they’re malnourished.
“That figure of 39,000 deaths is a gross underestimate for those dying from trauma, but those figures will be dwarfed by the people dying from excess deaths – malnutrition, cancer not being treated, heart disease, kidney disease, you name it.”
