Surgeon tells Cork solidarity rally of malnourished patients dying without pain relief in Gaza 

At the 41 st Palestine solidarity march in Cork City at the weekend, the crowd heard of a little girl whose 'burns on her face were so bad that we could see her facial bones'. 

An English surgeon has described the horrors of operating on Palestinian civilians injured in the conflict in Gaza, and says that malnutrition is now the biggest problem facing its citizens.

Professor Nick Maynard, a consultant gastrointestinal surgeon at Oxford University Hospital and a regular volunteer with Medical Aid for Palestinians has worked in Gaza twice since the beginning of the current conflict last October.

At the 41 st Palestine solidarity march in Cork City at the weekend, Dr Maynard told the crowd of a little girl he operated on whose “burns on her face were so bad that we could see her facial bones”. 

“All we could do is try to let her die in comfort and peace. But we couldn’t even do that because we had no pain relief, no morphine, to give her,” he said.

He said the difference between his trip in December and in May was that his patients now were dying not just of their injuries, but from a lack of strength due to starvation.

“At Christmas there was non-stop bombing. The whole time we were operating on major bomb injuries, all day and all night, with constant machine gun battles in the background. We hardly slept,” he told the Irish Examiner. “It was just non-stop operating.”

“The second trip, it was quite a bit quieter from a bombardment perspective, and while we still operated on a lot of bomb victims, the really strong narrative was seeing the appalling effects of malnutrition,” he said.

Dr Maynard, who spent his time volunteering at the Al Aqsa hospital in Deir al Balah in central Gaza, said that he became used to seeing “the young you would expect to survive dying anyway from the malnutrition”. 

Dealing with the complications of it was just awful. In terms of the wounds and the repairs of internal organs, they were just falling to pieces, and so many died.

He said that his speciality saw him doing many operations on peoples’ chests and other associated trauma injuries.

“It’s very challenging out there. Bear in mind, I’ve been going there since 2010, it has always been challenging in Gaza due to a lack of resources, but those challenges are so much more extreme now, and it was worse again in May than in January in terms of what we had to work with,” he said.

In terms of the lack of resources, he noted that “we were operating with very little”. 

“We had no sterile drapes for the operative field, had to make our own. Often there was no water to scrub up with, very limited instruments, and a real lack of drugs so no antibiotics and no pain relief - so you had children with terrible injuries and you couldn’t even relieve their pain.”

“These patients were severely malnourished, with terrible internal injuries due to shrapnel and you couldn’t even feed them intravenously. So many died because you simply couldn’t feed them. 

"Meanwhile the level of infections were sky-high because of the levels of malnourishment. It was treating patients under the most horrendous circumstances."

Dr Maynard told the crowd that “there have been more children murdered in Gaza in the last nine months than in all the conflicts all over the world in the last five years”.

“Much of what has happened in the last nine months has appalled me, and I have seen things in Gaza which I never could have imagined I would see in a civilised world,” he said, adding however that “most upsetting of all has been the hypocrisy and double standards by governments, media, academic and medical institutions”.

He said that the suggestion that what has happening in Gaza is something other than genocide “is no longer remotely credible”.

It’s gone far beyond trying to eradicate Hamas, this is a targeted operation against a civilian population. I’ve witnessed the direct targeting of hospitals, the killing of healthcare workers, I’ve met people who have been abducted and tortured by the IDF. It seems to me a very clear mission by Israel to get Palestinians out of Gaza.

Asked what happens next, Prof Maynard is unequivocal.

“It has to be a ceasefire, but the only way that happens is if western governments insist on it,” he said.

He hopes to return to volunteer once more, hopefully before October of this year, but “with Rafah closed the only way in is through Israel, and they’re imposing very strict restrictions”.

“But I want to go back, I’m very passionate about Gaza,” he said.