'There was no room for them': Doctor speaks of the horrific scenes in Gaza

A DOCTOR who works in Gaza has spoken to The Echo about treating critically injured children on an emergency room floor as they died without pain relief or privacy.

Professor Nick Maynard is a consultant surgeon working in Oxford University Hospital and specialising in cancer surgery.

He has visited Gaza since 2010 as part of Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP), a UK-based charity, performing and teaching cancer surgery in the enclave.

The Israel-Hamas war erupted after Hamas-led militants killed about 1,200 people in a co-ordinated series of attacks in southern Israel on October 7.

In the six months since then, Gaza has come under heavy IDF bombardment, with the death toll now approaching 33,000, or 2% of the entire population.

On St Stephen’s Day, Dr Maynard, whose wife Fionnuala is from Kinsale, led MAP’s first medical team to go to Gaza after the October attacks.

“For two weeks, I was working in al-Aqsa Hospital, I was operating every day, dealing with very severe explosive injuries, and I also spent time in the emergency room and saw just the most awful things,” he said.

“We dealt with a huge volume of patients coming in, with often dozens upon dozens of severely injured people arriving at the same time, totally overwhelming the hospital.

“And terrible injuries, mainly in children, a lot of children, a lot of young adults, but a lot of children with terrible burn injuries, some of which they were inevitably going to die from, kids having lost one, two, sometimes three limbs, and we had very limited ability to treat them.

“The amount of trauma that came in overwhelmed the capacity of the operating theatres; we often had no morphine or pain relief to give them, there was no room for them, so we were treating small children lying on the ground, often when they were dying, they were dying lying on the ground in the emergency room, in public, because there was nowhere for them to go.”

Dr Maynard is due to return to Gaza, but he said the killing last week of seven aid workers from the charity World Central Kitchen has heightened anxiety among healthcare volunteers. He claimed that Israel has been deliberately targeting healthcare workers and aid workers since the beginning of the current conflict. Israel has denied claims attacks have been deliberate. He said the compound he had been staying in had been bombed a week after he had left Gaza, seriously injuring four British doctors staying there.

“It’s made me certainly very apprehensive about going back, but I’ve got a wonderfully supportive wife and family, and I’ve got so many close friends in Gaza that I feel an absolute compulsion to get back out there and help in any way I can,” he said.

On Saturday afternoon, Dr Maynard spoke to a capacity crowd in UCC’s Boole Library.

Earlier, some 300 people braved Storm Kathleen to attend the 26th weekly rally organised by the Cork Palestine Solidarity Campaign (CPSC) on the Grand Parade, before walking to UCC to hear Dr Maynard speak.

Eimear Ní Mhaoldomnaigh, who is a member of CPSC, described Dr Maynard’s address as “harrowing”, saying that his first-hand experience had given an invaluable insight into the depth of difficulty faced by medics working in Gaza.