Oxford University Professor Nick Maynard, chair of the UK charity Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP), has worked in the Gaza Strip since 2010, teaching medical students and carrying out operations in Gaza’s hospitals.
Since the outbreak of the Israeli war on Gaza in October 2023, he has made several trips to Gaza to carry out trauma surgeries on Gazan patients wounded as a result of Israeli military attacks on civilians.
Could you describe how Medical Aid for Palestinians conducts its work in Gaza? What are the challenges faced in practise by your organisation?
Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) is commonly called a UK-based charity. But, in fact, the core of its work takes place in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, in Gaza, in the West Bank, and indeed in the Lebanese refugee camps as well.
I think we are almost unique amongst the NGOs that work in Gaza because we have such a large body of local staff. Nearly 140 local Gazans work for MAP, so they do a huge amount of work. Even in the absence of any of the [foreign] emergency teams being able to go in, they can still do a lot of work supporting healthcare in Gaza and in the West Bank.
It’s been a huge job to do for MAP since the [Israeli] government has banned, I think, over 36 NGOs from taking emergency teams in. Those NGOs which relied entirely upon foreign staff going in have had to almost stop their work now. But MAP continues the incredible work it does with all its local staff running clinics, working in the hospital, helping with aid.
How do you provide aid as doctors? Other NGO workers have said that the logistics of getting trained doctors to treat patients is a huge endeavour. Can you help remotely? How in practise do you manage to get doctors to see and be near patients?
Remote medicine has a role, telemedicine, giving advice online… But there is a very limited role at the moment in Gaza because the telecommunications are so poor. And the most important work one can do is actually in Gaza, providing health care on the ground with the patients.
Gaza has always been an incredibly challenging place to be, to provide health care, long before 7 October 2023. Gaza has been occupied for many years. Its economy has been almost completely disabled by Israeli control. And the Israelis control everything that goes in, the drugs, the equipment for doing operations. So, we’ve always had to work with a very significant lack of resources. That’s been magnified so much for the last two and a half years.
But the local healthcare teams there, the doctors, the nurses, the physiotherapists, the dieticians, they still work heroically and practise, considering the lack of resources, a remarkably high level of medical care. But it is very difficult to do so without any resources.
What led you, as a doctor, to decide to go to Gaza to begin with, to do this work?
It was real serendipity in many ways. It was back in 2005, I think, or 2006. I was asked to go to the West Bank to teach Palestinian medical students of Al-Quds University. I went to Makassed Hospital [in Jerusalem] to teach, then I went to Hebron, Ramallah, Nablus, Bethlehem, to teach medical students. We did that for a few years, and then I was asked to do the same in Gaza.
So, I went to Gaza, I think, in 2010 for the first time. And I’ve been taking a team of doctors from Oxford to teach medical students every year since then. And separately, I’d also been working with MAP prior to 7 October, going in regularly to teach and carry out cancer surgeries. That’s what I do in Oxford. But then, after the awful events of 7 October, I made several trips to Gaza to do trauma surgery. But the reason I go, the reason I keep going back, is because of the Palestinian people.
They are the most beautiful, kind, resilient people I’ve ever met in my life. And what has been done to them for decades, but particularly in the last two and half years, is so profoundly wrong, so unjust, so evil, that I feel I’m in this remarkably privileged position to be able to go and help them. And I feel obliged to do so.
How does it work logistically for you to come in and out of Gaza?
We go in through the emergency medical team mechanism constructed by the World Health Organisation (WHO). We go in under that structure facilitated by the United Nations. We go in a United Nations convoy. The WHO and the UN facilitate this emergency medical team. The Israelis are obliged to give those teams unlimited access. But, of course, we do not have unlimited access. We’ve now been banned, MAP, Doctors without Borders – 36 organisations have now been banned, irrationally so, by the Israelis. And we are not allowed to go in now.
What are the main obstacles to treating patients? What kind of injuries have you treated?
My work has focused in the last two and a half years predominantly on treating major traumas. That has been the main work because the amount of trauma inflicted on the Gazan population is beyond words for anyone to describe.
The hospitals are very under-resourced. I mean, the remaining hospitals since most of them have been destroyed. There is only one major hospital still functioning in Gaza. That is the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younes, and it is only partly functioning. So, the hospitals that remain are overwhelmed with work. They can’t cope with the trauma, let alone with the other diseases, and they happen to treat these appalling trauma victims with very little resources.
Often, for two and half years, there has been no electricity going into Gaza. So, they are totally reliant upon local fuel supplies. If the fuel runs out, there is no power so the ventilators cannot work, the incubators cannot work, the lights don’t work. The surgeons sometimes having to operate using a mobile phone light. I remember one two-week period I spent there, we had no sterile drips at all for the operating theatres, no water to wash up in, often no drugs. We were treating children without any pain relief. We had appalling circumstances.
Everyone copes remarkably well and still tries to provide the best possible care. But what this means, of course, is that people are dying of injuries that could be treated and cured in different circumstances.
And there are also people dying as a result of malnutrition and of hundreds of thousands of chronic diseases, kidney failures, heart disease, and strokes that cannot be treated. Who do you consider to be responsible for this situation?
The two main reasons are, clearly, [first] the incessant bombardment by the Israelis. There has been a massive military assault that has caused well over the 70,000 or so that we are told to be the number of deaths. The Lancet [a respected UK medical journal] has estimated that the direct number of trauma deaths is probably over 100,000. But the other [cause of] excess deaths, which is much greater than that, is caused by the Israeli blockade: the Israeli refusal to allow food to come into Gaza; the refusal to allow medicines, drugs, and equipment to come in. This is what is killing all these people.
All of this is, of course, a breach of international law. But despite that the Israelis are still refusing essential goods to get in there. And that is leading to these huge numbers of excess deaths.
Can you give us specific information about the cases you have encountered? What were the situations that had the greatest impact on you?
I can read name after name of children who died of their injuries. Children that I have operated on who ended up dying because of a lack of resources, because of lack of food. Little children who suffered severely from the results of explosions.
I can tell you about little Alaa, and little Aya, a boy and a girl, a brother and a sister. Alaa was six, and Aya was eight; they were the sole remaining members of their family. Their parents were killed. Their other siblings were also killed. They both had devastating injuries. I remember we had to treat Aya. She didn’t have life-threatening injuries. But she had a badly broken leg, very displaced, so the blood supply had been cut. But that leg had to be straightened immediately in order to stop the leg from dying. And that had to be done without pain killers as there were none that day in the hospital. We had completely run out of pain relief. So, now as I tell you the story, I can still hear her screaming as that leg had to be straightened.
I can tell you about Habiba, a beautiful 11-year-old girl whom I spent the whole night operating on. She had suffered from an explosion that shattered her lower esophagus and her chest. I spent the whole night operating on her, but she died four weeks later because we had no food to give to her. And the reason we had no food was the fact that the Israelis were preventing it from coming in. Not only were they preventing it from coming in, they were also searching through foreign doctors’ luggage at the border and removing containers of formula feed to prevent it from being taken into Gaza.
I can tell you about Lama, a beautiful 18-year-old girl, Hala a 16-year-old girl, Tala a 16-year-old girl. These were patients, young ladies, young girls I operated on, who died as a result of malnutrition, because there was no food coming in. I can tell you about the boys, the teenage boys I operated on, who had been shot by Israeli soldiers at the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation food distribution point. The 12-year-old boy who I was called to operate on. I can talk about [the time] when I was called to help my Gazan colleague who had been shot by an Israeli soldier. He bled to death on the operating table. I couldn’t save his life.
I could go on telling you name after name, after name. Story after story. Most of those I’m mentioning were children. Seventy per cent of the people I treated were women and children. They were not Hamas militants. They were innocent civilians. We know the pattern of injuries. I co-wrote a paper for the British Medical Journal at the end of last year, where we described the injuries we had seen, the traumatic injuries we had seen, the gun shots wounds.
We described a pattern of injuries which had only previously been seen in true war combat situations, with soldiers fighting soldiers. The injuries we saw have never been described in civilian populations before, because there was such a large volume of injuries in civilians caused by weapons, arms, designed specifically to cause the maximum amount of tissue damage. And these are civilians being targeted in this way. I remember a pregnant lady I operated on who had been shot by a quadcopter. She was just in her tent.
Could you say something about the Israeli use of quadcopters?
A quadcopter is a remotely controlled drone used all over Gaza by the Israeli military. These are six-wing drones which hover all over the place. They have cameras on them, they have guns on them. They are flown into tents in Al-Mawasi [the so-called safe zone on the coast where Gazans had been ordered to move], they are flown into hospitals to shoot people. A friend of mine was in the operating theatre of the Nasser Hospital when he was shot in the chest by a quadcopter that was remotely controlled, presumably by an Israeli back in Tel Aviv.
Someone was deliberately shooting a doctor while he was operating on a patient?
Absolutely. They were deliberately shooting targets of their choice. The pregnant lady I treated was just lying down in a tent in Al-Mawasi. The quadcopter was raining bullets over all the tents. Luckily, we saved her life and the baby survived against the odds. There are endless awful stories like this one.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 11 June, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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