‘What Is Being Done to Them Is So Profoundly Evil'
British medic tells the Byline Podcast he will return to Gaza despite a horrific so-called 'double tap' strike by Israel on the hospital where he worked
A British medic has vowed to return to Gaza despite seeing his former students blown up in an horrific ‘double tap’ attack last week by the Israeli military.
Dr Nick Maynard, a surgeon from Oxford, recently spent a month teaching at the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, which was struck by an Israeli missile - and then attacked again shortly afterwards, killing 20 people who had rushed to the scene to rescue injured patients.
Among those who died were five journalists and two of Dr Maynard’s trainees. He described watching the incident online as “horrific” and said, “these were medical students whom I had been teaching five weeks previously, and they're there, in the middle of these appalling atrocities being carried out. They've been killed trying to learn medicine. It's beyond description how barbaric this attack was.”
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu initially called the slaughter a “tragic mishap”, but the Israeli Defence Force later insisted it had successfully targeted six Hamas terrorists, including one who had been involved in the atrocity on October 7, 2023 which sparked the latest Palestinian conflict.
The IDF has made similar claims after previous assaults on medical facilities, but Dr Maynard - speaking to the Byline Podcast - insisted it was “ludicrous” to link Nasser Hospital to Hamas.
He said: “I've been to every single square inch of that hospital, with no access limited to me whatsoever. It's inconceivable to me that that hospital was being used as a militant Hamas command centre, and you'll get the same evidence from the multiple hundreds of foreign healthcare workers who have worked in these hospitals, and yet the Israeli spokespeople keep repeating these claims. It's still repeated almost daily by our media. And yet there has been no verifiable or remotely credible evidence put forward by the Israelis about those statements.”
Dr Maynard has visited Gaza three times since October 7, 2023 with the charity Medical Aid for Palestine after previously helping in the West Bank, and admits that, “each time I go, I think it can't possibly be worse than the previous time. I think I'm going to be prepared, because I know Gaza so well. But each time, it's much worse, and each time I'm not adequately prepared for it. It's impossible to prepare yourself for the real atrocities one sees there.”
He says a genocide is underway as preparation for the “ethnic cleansing” of Gaza and believes Israel’s government is responsible for numerous war crimes in the region, including using starvation as a weapon of war against the civilian population. Despite that - and the obvious risk of dying in a similar attack to the one carried out at Nasser Hospital - he plans to return as soon as he can.
“I have a deep, deep passion for Gaza,” he said. “It has a an incredible draw. It is the people, more than anything else. They are a truly remarkable, truly inspirational, truly heroic people, particularly the healthcare workers that I've got to know so well there.
“What is being done to them is so profoundly evil, so profoundly unjust, that I see it as an inevitability, that I go out and help them, whatever the dangers are, it's so important to show solidarity and go and help them.”
Listen to the full Byline Podcast interview with Nick Maynard below