Inside Gaza’s apocalypse: A doctor’s testimony from a landscape of rubble and starvation

A veteran volunteer surgeon describes deliberate shootings, starvation and mass devastation in Gaza as he prepares to speak in Clare

Dr Maynard said American doctors had come to Gaza with formula feed in their luggage, and the Israeli border guards removed every container.

A surgeon who has been volunteering in Gaza since the start of the current conflict has said he has witnessed “the clearest evidence of war crimes”, citing the deliberate targeting of civilians and the use of starvation as a weapon of war.

Professor Nick Maynard, a consultant gastrointestinal surgeon at Oxford University Hospital in the UK, has volunteered in Gaza over the past two decades with Medical Aid for Palestinians.

A regular visitor to his wife’s native Kinsale, Dr Maynard spoke to the Irish Examiner ahead of a public talk he will give in Co Clare this weekend.

He said he had been “privileged” to lead the first UK emergency medical team into Gaza two months after the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, in which some 1,200 Israeli citizens were killed and 254 hostages taken, sparking the latest bombardment of the region.

Since then, in the region of 70,000 people are estimated to have been killed by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) in the besieged enclave.

This week, Amnesty International warned Israel was “still committing genocide” against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, despite the ceasefire agreed last month.

The fragile truce between Israel and Hamas came into effect on October 10, after two years of war.

“The ceasefire risks creating a dangerous illusion that life in Gaza is returning to normal,” said Amnesty’s secretary general Agnès Callamard. 

“But while Israeli authorities and forces have reduced the scale of their attacks and allowed limited amounts of humanitarian aid into Gaza, the world must not be fooled. Israel’s genocide is not over.”

Dr Maynard spoke of the horrors he has witnessed in Gaza.

“I’ve seen babies who’ve been shot. I’ve seen babies who’ve lost their limbs. I’ve seen multiple young teenage boys who’ve been deliberately shot by the Israeli military and shot in specific parts of the body on specific days,” he said.

“This clustering of injuries was so striking it cannot possibly be coincidence.

"And all of us who witnessed it felt it could only be a form of target practice that they were saying ‘Right, today, lads, we’re going to shoot them in the head. Tomorrow, we’ll shoot them in the chest. On Saturday night, we’ll shoot them in the testicles'."

He said he had witnessed extreme malnutrition, with babies dying because of the lack of formula feed.

“I remember a little baby called Zaynab who was seven months old, who died when I was there because there was no there was no formula feed to give her. All the nurses could give her was water with sugar in it, which has no nutritional value.” 

Dr Maynard said four days before Zaynab died, American doctors had come to Gaza with formula feed in their luggage, and the Israeli border guards removed every container.

“They say they remove anything that could be used as a weapon. I’m really struggling to think what purpose could formula feed have other than feed babies. It’s obscene, deliberate starvation, a war crime."

Conditions in Gaza are worse than can be imagined from television news reports, he said, with the areas in the north of the Gaza Strip and around Gaza City almost uninhabitable.

“If you ever saw the Mad Max films of yesteryear, the post-apocalyptic landscape in those areas, it is exactly like that. As far as you can see, it’s just rubble, mass destruction.” 

'I often join the Cork people in their march every single Saturday. They’ve marched every Saturday since October 7, which is wonderful, and they need to continue doing that.'

The majority of the population has now been displaced, he said, and are living in their hundreds of thousands in Al-Mawasi, a previously unoccupied desert coastal area from Deir al-Balah down to Rafah now filled with thousands of makeshift tents.

“The word ‘tents’ doesn’t really do it justice, they’re for the most part tarpaulin sheets, canvas covers, which are, of course, all being destroyed in the severe rains which have taken place in recent weeks."

He said he feels despair whenever he goes to Gaza, and a fear he will never see Gazan friends alive again.

"You feel an extreme anger that the world is allowing this to happen, you feel a complete incomprehension about how humans can treat other humans like this."

Dr Maynard said he was “blown away” by the pressure Irish people have placed on their Government.

“I spend a lot of time in Cork, in Kinsale, and I often join the Cork people in their march every single Saturday. They’ve marched every Saturday since October 7, which is wonderful, and they need to continue doing that,” he said.

“The Irish Government can do more. They’re doing more than the UK government, of course, but they could put a lot more pressure on the US government, and at the end of the day, the US government could stop this completely overnight.

“It was, frankly, bizarre that Donald Trump should be campaigning for the Nobel Peace Prize when he could have stopped it the minute he came into power, when the minute he took over the US presidency. Indeed, Biden could have stopped it two years ago,” he said.

"The US have it within their power to stop this overnight, and they have failed to do so."

The 1948 UN genocide convention defines genocide as any of five “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group”.

In December 2024, Amnesty concluded Israel was committing genocide in Gaza by three of those acts — including deliberately inflicting on Palestinians conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction.

In an update on Thursday, Amnesty said: “Israel continues to severely restrict the entry of supplies and the restoration of services essential for the survival of the civilian population.

“Despite a reduction in scale of attacks, and some limited improvements, there has been no meaningful change in the conditions Israel is inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza and no evidence to indicate that Israel’s intent has changed.”

The Israeli foreign ministry has consistently rejected allegations of genocide, describing them as “entirely false”, “fabricated” and “based on lies”.

• Dr Nick Maynard will give a fundraising talk at 6pm this Saturday, November 30, at Cultúrlann Sweeney in Kilkee, Co Clare. Tickets are €20, with all proceeds going to Medical Aid for Palestine.
• Further information here.