A Consultant Surgeon's Report

 I'm writing this from Nasser hospital in southern Gaza, where I've just finished operating on another severely malnourished young teenager. A seven month old baby lies in our paediatric intensive care unit, so tiny and malnourished that I initially mistook her as a newborn. The phrase "skin and bones" doesn't do justice to the way her body has been ravaged. She is literally wasting away before our eyes, and we are powerless to save her. We are witnessing deliberate starvation in Gaza right now.

This is my third time in Gaza since December 2023 as a volunteer surgeon with Medical Aid for Palestinians...

The malnutrition crisis has become catastrophic since my last visit. Every day I watch patients deteriorate and die - not from their injuries, but because they are too malnourished to survive surgery... Four babies have died in the last few weeks in this hospital - not from bombs or bullets, but from starvation.. Children are being given 10% dextrose (sugar water), which has no nutritional value, and often their mothers are too malnourished to breastfeed. When an international colleague tried to bring baby formula into Gaza, Israeli authorities confiscated it...

Until May, Gaza had more than 400 aid distribution sites where people could access food safely. Now there are just four of these militarised zones in the south, where starving families are in constant danger of attack...

I have operated on boys aged 12 to 15, whose relatives say they were shot while trying to get food for their families. My colleagues in the emergency department have also reported a disturbing pattern: injuries concentrated on specific body parts on different days - heads, legs, genitals - suggesting there has been deliberate targeting of those body parts...

The enforced malnutrition and attacks on civilians will kill thousands more if not stopped. Every day of inaction means more children will die not just from bullets or bombs, but from hunger. A permanent ceasefire, the free and safe flow of aid via the UN-led system, and the lifting of the blockade are needed now - and all can be achieved with political will.

The British government's continued complicity in Israel's atrocities is unconscionable, and I do not want to spend another day operating on children who have been shot and starved by a military our government supports. History will judge not just those who committed these crimes, but those who stood by and watched. From inside Nasser hospital, I am telling you: this is deliberate. This is preventable. And this must stop now.

(Nick Maynard, The Guardian, 2025)

Professor Nick Maynard is a consultant surgeon at Oxford University hospital who has travelled regularly to Gaza for 15 years. He is currently volunteering with Medical Aid for Palestinians at Nasser hospital in Gaza.