Nick Maynard, a British surgeon currently working at the Nasser Hospital in Gaza, has told The Telegraph that Palestinians in the besieged enclave are facing “unprecedented malnutrition” due to the Israeli blockade and that Israeli snipers are targeting people seeking food near aid distribution sites.
Maynard said that the aid sites run by the US and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) were “death traps” and that IDF snipers were targeting “certain body parts on different days, such as the head, legs, or genitals.” Nearly 900 aid seekers have been killed by Israeli forces since the GHF began operating in Gaza.
The British surgeon said that he had operated on many young teenage boys who were wounded near aid sites. “A twelve-year-old boy I was operating on died from his injuries on the operating table – he had been shot through the chest,” he said.
Maynard said that severe malnutrition has been contributing to preventable deaths among Palestinians receiving surgery. “The malnutrition I’m seeing here is indescribably bad. It’s much, much worse now than a year ago,” he said.
“The repairs that we carry out fall to pieces, patients get terrible infections, and they die. I have never had so many patients die because they can’t get enough food to recover,” he added.
Babies have been starving to death in Gaza due to Israeli restrictions on baby formula, as malnourished mothers cannot produce breast milk. Maynard said that the Nasser Hospital is also running out of intravenous liquid fluids used to treat severely malnourished children and that four infants died of malnutrition at the hospital last week.
“I saw a seven-month-old who looked like a newborn. The expression ‘skin and bones’ doesn’t do it justice,” Maynard said.
The British surgeon also volunteered in Gaza last year and said his visit to the besieged enclave was the worst thing he had ever experienced. “It was much worse than we could possibly have imagined. I couldn’t compare it to anything, it was just like nothing I’ve seen on Earth,” he said at the time.
