Tom O Connor

Meet the British surgeon who believes Israeli soldiers were using starving Palestinian children for target practice. Here's some of the Israeli savagery he saw in Gaza: 1. A twelve-year-old boy was shot while trying to obtain food for his starving family. Maynard operated on him. The bullet had torn through major blood vessels. The boy died on the operating table. 2. Children arrived with gunshot wounds concentrated in particular parts of their bodies on different days. One day, heads and necks. Another, chests. Another, abdomens. Then arms and legs. Maynard and his colleagues struggled to believe this was coincidental. 3. Four teenage boys, aged approximately 12–15, arrived with bullets through their testicles. All four came in within roughly an hour. Maynard witnessed their arrival and spoke with the urologists treating them. He suspected Israeli soldiers were playing a game of target practice. 4. A seven-month-old baby was so emaciated that he mistook her for a newborn. She was wasting away before his eyes. The hospital had almost nothing suitable to feed her. 5. Eleven-year-old Habiba survived a devastating explosive injury, only to die from lack of nutrition. Maynard spent an entire night reconstructing her shattered oesophagus. The operation succeeded. But she could not eat, and the hospital lacked the nutritional support she needed. Four weeks later, she was dead. 6. A six-year-old boy and his eight-year-old sister had lost their parents. The girl's leg was so badly fractured that the blood supply to her foot was threatened. Doctors had to straighten it without pain relief. Maynard could still hear her screams. 7. A pregnant woman was shot while sheltering in a tent. Maynard operated on her. The bullet missed her uterus by just a few centimetres. Both mother and unborn child survived. 8. A missile struck the intensive-care unit beside the operating theatre while he was performing surgery. It happened at Al-Aqsa Hospital in January 2024. He finished the operation. The foreign medical team subsequently had to evacuate. 9. A theatre nurse he knew was killed in his tent alongside his three young children. Maynard continued operating as Gaza's already devastated medical workforce suffered further losses. 10. Doctors he had known for years were barely recognisable from starvation. Some had lost 20 or 30 kilograms. They continued treating wounded children while their own bodies deteriorated. And patients whose organs had been surgically repaired were dying because hunger prevented their wounds from healing. Maynard had been visiting Gaza since 2010. He knew the hospitals, the surgeons, the nurses. He had seen the devastation of earlier wars. But nothing prepared him for what he witnessed in 2025. Speaking about the apparent pattern of gunshot injuries, he said: “I would never have believed this possible unless I'd witnessed this with my own eyes.”