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Aug. 12, 2025 - Jim Fetzer
31:20
Israel Is Shooting Babies In The Head - Gaza Doctor Nick Maynard
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It is difficult to have the words anymore to describe the genocidal depravity which the Israeli state, with the full complicity and facilitation of our government, is in is unleashing against the Palestinian people in Gaza.
But there's no better person to discuss that with than Dr. Nick Maynard, who has just come back from Gaza.
He was there for a month this time in Nassau Hospital in Khan Yunis.
Uh, that's his third time since this genocide began, but he has been to Gaza many times before that and so Nick honestly, we're just incredibly honoured to to be able to speak to you and you.
You came back last week and it's it's it's um, I mean, you've done this, this brilliant round of interviews on on television and and to explain what's happening what, what is happening.
I just wait, if it's okay, and first it's great to see you.
I just want to just this time, this four week period, just what?
When you had to?
I know you tell us you had to prepare yourself to go to Gaza.
What was it compared to those previous visits and how much could you actually have prepared yourself for what you were going to see?
Yeah, thank you, and it's great to see you again, and thank you for asking me back on your show.
Um, a lot of what I have seen and experienced all, i'm afraid, almost defies description.
I, I know Gaza really well, as my third trip, as you say, since the genocide started.
I, each time I go, I think i'm going to be ready.
I think i'm going to be prepared.
I I know Gaza really well.
I've got a lot of friends there.
I'm in contact most days with people out there.
So each time i've gone I think i'm going to be prepared.
But each time i'm woefully unprepared, i'm afraid, because the horrors just get worse.
This most recent trip I had, I had a month out there um, I knew what I was going to see.
I knew I was going to see malnutrition.
I knew I was going to see relentless mass casualties, but it was just so much worse than I thought.
The malnutrition was deeply distressing to witness, watching newborn babies die of malnutrition, watching children die of malnutrition, watching adults who i'd operate on die of malnutrition just so much worse than i've seen even last year when I was there.
Um, and the new experience seeing which I would never have imagined I would see the, the multiple shootings I operated on, saw patients from multiple shootings affecting very young teenage boys, sometimes as young as 11 or 12, who'd all been shot by Israeli soldiers and quadcopters at the food distribution sites,
the bizarrely named Gaza humanitarian foundation sites, and seeing these young boys being brought in.
One of them, a 12-year-old boy, died on the operating table while we were Operating on it because his injuries were so severe.
But seeing many of these kids being brought in, they were going to these food distribution sites.
They were going to get food for their starving families.
And the particularly distressing thing was the clustering of particular body part shootings on particular days.
So one day, for example, we'd see these young boys coming in with predominantly gunshot wounds to the head, another day gunshot wounds to the neck, another day gunshot wounds to the chest or the abdomen.
One day, even two and a half weeks ago, we saw four young teenage boys, all of whom brought in at the same time with gunshot wounds to the testicles.
And the clustering, the targeting was so striking that it was inconceivable that it was coincidence.
And it just made us all believe this was some sort of obscene target practice, some games being played by the Israeli soldiers.
And the narrative, the descriptions I received from the families, from the patients, and indeed from close friends of mine, Garza and healthcare workers who'd been at the food distribution points, all described the same thing of Israeli soldiers and quadcopters shooting these poor young boys.
So just awful.
And nothing could have prepared me for that.
So I know this is kind of teasing this out even more than you've already said in quite explicit terms, but there's no actual conceivable or rational explanation other than on particular days, those Israeli soldiers have decided to shoot at a specific area of the bodies of teenage boys, of many of them, their children we're talking about here.
And that's what they're doing.
It's like today we'll go for the abdomen or today we'll go for the testicles.
And that's what they've done.
Absolutely.
And as you can imagine, I've thought incessantly about this.
I cannot imagine any other reason other than that which you've described and the one that appeared to us.
They're playing a game.
That's what it seemed like to us.
And so many of us notice this pattern in the emergency room, all the specialist surgeons.
It's an obscene thought.
And I would not have thought it possible if I had not seen this with my own eyes.
So yes, I think it's exactly as you describe.
I mean, that itself is indicative of, I guess, what would have been your wider clinical experience.
Because if we're at a point where soldiers have dehumanized the people whose land they're occupying so much that they're prepared to play games of let's shoot at various parts of their anatomy this day, then the wider conclusion is that they will simply have no respect of it, any description for civilian life.
And a lot then flows from that, that you are just treating civilians who are actually being deliberately killed as a matter of policy.
These aren't, you know, it's not even we're being completely reckless and we've decided this is a Hamas militant and we're just going to blow up this building, not that there's many buildings left.
And then we that's the videos we're killing.
But we're talking about something quite different there.
We're talking about the deliberate shooting of civilians.
Absolutely.
And, you know, we've witnessed, you'll have seen many of the interviews that I've given or other UK doctors or American doctors.
And indeed, many of us have put this down in print to letters to our respective governments.
Every single healthcare worker I have been out there with, spoken to, has witnessed at various times over the last 22 months, gunshot wounds to babies' heads or to babies' chests or to babies' abdomens, toddlers being shot.
The pattern of injuries, the frequency with which we're seeing them, it is inconceivable this is collateral damage.
The only explanation any of us can conceive of is that this is deliberate targeting.
I saw, you know, I operated on two young women just about a week before I left Gaza who had both been living in tents.
I mean, I call them tents, but they're hardly tents.
They're makeshift shelters right next door to the food distribution centers, these GHF centers.
One of them was pregnant.
One of them was breastfeeding her seven-month-old boy.
They were both shot in their tents by quadcopters, and they both described, and I heard this from other people as well, they both described the quadcopters shooting systematically at all the tents, at all the makeshift shelters next to these food distribution points.
So they weren't just shooting the young teenage boys.
It wasn't just the Israeli snipers shooting Israeli boys.
The quadcopters were shooting deliberately the tents.
These two women both shot severe injuries in the abdomen.
I had to operate on both of them.
Luckily, both survived.
The pregnant lady, the baby, was fine.
So they're both doing very well.
But again, clear examples of deliberately shooting at these makeshift shelters where innocent, in these circumstances, two young women were living.
So there's no way this can be explained by random collateral damage.
It's deliberate targeting, as you describe.
And so people are clear about quadcopters.
In terms of the operation of quadcopters, from your understanding, what is available, the visual information to the Israeli soldiers who are hungry into those quadcopters?
So the quadcopters are drones with four RICs, fixed rotors so they can hover.
They have cameras on them.
They have guns associated on them as well.
And they are driven, they're flown remotely controlled by Israeli soldiers.
I'm told some of it by artificial intelligence, but I can only speculate about that.
But what is unequivocally true is that they are being controlled and going into hospitals, going into tents.
I've seen them shooting people when I was at Deir al-Bala at Al-Aqsa Hospital last year.
And they go into hospitals, they go into tents and they shoot.
And they're being controlled by, presumably, by Israeli military.
There was one theatre nurse called Hazem, who I know well.
His sister is a theatre nurse.
I've operated with her at European Gaza Hospital many times in recent years when I've been there doing cancer surgery.
Her brother Hazem is a theatre nurse in Nasser Hospital where I've just been.
I worked with him on many days these last months.
Nine months ago, he was working in the operating theatres at Nasser Hospital and a quadcopter, remotely controlled by an Israeli military doctor, military personnel, went into the hospital, went into the theatre complex, which is on the fourth floor of the hospital, and shot Hazem in the chest.
He survived, but they shot him in the chest whilst he was preparing the operating theatre for operations.
Was then abducted by the Israeli military and taken off into an Israeli prison.
Luckily, only for two weeks.
He was released after two weeks.
Many others have been imprisoned for six months.
So these quadcopters are used all over Gaza and have flown into hospitals to kill people.
I mean, you said that, and again, just unpacking this, it feels so gruesome and hideous, but about the shooting of babies in the head and the chest and toddlers in the head and the chest.
Just again, so we're clear about why that has to be intentional.
Is that because, for example, if you have what we describe as indiscriminate, reckless firing of bullets, which is a crime in itself, but a different sort of crime, is the point you would then expect to receive patients where the bullets were kind of randomly around different parts of their body.
Whereas in these cases, it was just the tendency was that in the, and we're talking about, again, toddlers and babies here, that it was too specific to the head and the chest for that to be possible.
Those were the appearances, absolutely.
It was the volume of cases we saw and what appeared to be the deliberate targeting.
You know, we can only speculate about the intentions, but the appearances, and it's not just me, there are multiple doctors who have borne witness to this and seen so many of these injuries that the appearances are very, very suggestive of deliberate targeting.
We now, I mean, this, as you say, this dystopian naming, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which replaced the effective UN system, which Israel has waged war on, quite literally, having killed hundreds of aid workers.
And even the Marine place in charge of the Gaza so-called humanitarian foundation resigned on the eve of its launch on the basis that it violated the basic principles of humanitarianism.
It often provides very, very little and often unusable aid because there isn't the cooking materials in order to food.
But we've seen over 1,100 Palestinians killed.
And I mean, is that a lot of patients that you'll be receiving?
It's people going, they don't have any food, they're desperately hungry.
They go to these militarized aid points and then they're just randomly shot at.
Yeah, I mean, there was one day when I was, I did a, I did a video recording whilst I was in the emergency room, just voicing my thoughts as I witnessed this.
There was a day when 30 dead bodies of young teenagers were brought in, who'd been shot, another 50 had been shot and were alive.
So 80, 80 young boys all shot at this food distribution site.
I've got appalling photos and memories of the families, the hysterical crying families carrying their dead sons out of the hospital for burial and seeing dozens of them doing it at the same time.
Just truly, truly awful.
And this happened many, many days when I was out there.
And as a recurring theme.
So you're right.
I mean, they had a good system.
As far as the system was in terms of distributing food, they had 400 food distribution points when UNRAL ran it.
They were, of course, very restricted by the Israeli military, and that remains the case.
But to replace that with four death traps is what people describe them as four food distribution points, which are designed to create chaos.
They're designed to create rioting.
They are death traps, allowing Israeli soldiers to shoot these kids.
I would not have believed it possible unless I was witnessing the results of those venues.
The UN-backed IPC concluded the worst case scenario of famine is unfolding across the Gaza Strip.
Can you just spell up what we talk about in terms of the malnutrition that you were seeing?
Like what, what, what, where are people at in terms of people who are, you said talking about babies, obviously, people, the more vulnerable will die first.
That's obviously true.
But what are you seeing?
What are the actual help, the actual consequences?
At what stage of malnutrition that you saw people?
Oh, severe.
I mean, I called this out when I was there last summer.
I called it out when I was there in December, January 23, 24.
It is inestimably worse now.
I mean, at every level.
So colleagues of mine, friends of mine, surgeons I've worked with, I barely recognise some of them.
Some of them had lost 30, 35 kilograms in weight.
They're all absolutely exhausted.
Patients, I operate predominantly on adults, but actually I operate on quite a few children on this occasion.
In the adults, I saw people who had lost 30, 40 kilograms in weight.
And they're not only profoundly malnourished when they come in, the effects of that malnutrition on their ability to heal from their devastating injuries, from the major, major surgery we carry out.
Their tissues don't heal.
And of course, we have no nutrition to give them when they're in hospital.
So not only are they malnourished when they arrived, we have no nutritional support to give them.
There is no food for these patients in the hospital.
They are totally reliant upon their families bringing it in.
So the mortality rate from these injuries, and I had many patients who died of their injuries, but they wouldn't have died had they not been malnourished.
And that's just the others.
And the kids, I had patients on the pediatric intensive care unit.
So I used to visit the pediatric units every day.
I saw newborn babies who die of malnutrition.
There was a little girl called Zainab who was eight months old.
She looked a newborn.
I have never seen anyone, any living being as thin as her.
And she died a week ago.
I saw many children.
They have a malnutrition unit, a severe malnutrition unit.
I used to go in there most days to talk to the families and see the kids, even though I wasn't directly responsible.
And it was just so distressing seeing these poor little children being starved.
They needed nutritional support.
They needed formula feed, for example.
They needed some of them intravenous feeding.
There was no intravenous nutrition available.
The formula feeds, I mentioned briefly earlier, the formula feeds were being confiscated, were being taken away by Israeli border guards, doctors and nurses who were bringing formula feed in.
They weren't just confiscating everything.
They were taking away specifically the cartons of formula feed.
I had a beautiful patient called Habiba, who was an 11-year-old girl who came in with a severe explosive injury from a bomb which had blown her up.
And she had terrible damage to her esophagus in her chest.
That's my main specialty that I operate on in England.
And I spent all night operating on her, reconstructing her esophagus, knowing that she wouldn't be able to eat or drink for weeks on end.
And she was therefore totally reliant upon nutritional support via a feeding tube I put in.
But she was so malnourished, she couldn't tolerate that.
She developed something very severe called refeeding syndrome.
So she needed intravenous feeding, and there was none to give her.
And she was alive when I left, but I got a phone call at the end of last week to say she just died, which was deeply, deeply distressing.
This poor 11-year-old girl, a preventable death, major injuries, but a preventable death.
And I could go on and on for hours talking about the malnutrition, how devastating it was.
And this is a man-made forced starvation, deliberately so, by the Israeli government and military, which is preventing food getting in there, preventing nutritional supplements getting in there, deliberately and undoubtedly leading to deaths.
It's obscene.
I mean, even if, and alas, this is not on the cards, even if all of a sudden now, by a miracle, Gaza was just mass-flooded with food and other forms of aid, is it at the point where, medically speaking, lots of people have passed the point of no return where they just wouldn't be able to.
I mean, would that still be a situation of lots of people would still die as a consequence of being starved?
Absolutely.
Even if they opened the borders and allowed unlimited trucks to come in, there are many patients who would still die, as you quite correctly said.
Some of them are so profoundly malnourished that food would be dangerous for them.
Food would not be that they need acute medical care.
Some of them need intravenous feeding.
Some of them need there's this condition called refeeding syndrome, which causes terrible imbalances in their blood and the electrolytes and the chemicals in the blood.
It can cause fatal arrhythmias.
So they need acute inpatient care to restore their nutrition.
So some of them are far beyond the need simply for food now.
I've been seeing and hearing reports of nurses and doctors who you're referring to, shocked by how much weight they've lost, but they've been so starved that they're fainting whilst at work.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, a friend of mine, a surgeon out there, on several occasions, almost passed out while he was operating and had to sit down, lie down, unscrub because he was so hungry.
Absolutely.
And people fainting.
I've seen nurses faint in theatres.
You know, and they come into work, and we sometimes forget that they're living in a tent or a makeshift tent.
Their families are starving.
One anesthesia I know used to go off in between operations to one of the food distribution sites in order to get food.
He came back one day, and a colleague of mine was operating with him.
He came back covered in cuts and bruises and grazes because he'd been fighting.
Because in these food distribution points, the Garza Humanitarian Foundation, they are designed to create.
So again, I didn't see them, but I saw photographs.
I had them described on so many occasions.
There's a compound, a locked compound with food in there for about 300 people.
They allow up to several thousand Gazans to accumulate, to gather outside the compound.
There's one narrow gate, which they then open to let them in.
And everyone knows there's a very, very limited amount of food.
So it is complete chaos.
There's rioting.
There's fighting.
There are people trying to steal the food.
It is complete chaos.
And this anaesthetic colleague of mine, you know, came in battered, bruised, grazed because they've been trying to get food for his starving family.
So it's affecting the staff massively so.
I mean, I guess what you're seeing is a lot of these intersecting problems.
People lack food, they lack fresh water, they like shelter.
I mean, often suffering extreme heat at this time of year.
They just have been ground down by the trauma, the indescribable trauma of what they've been subjected to.
So, I mean, is that it?
It's just so many overlap and illness, obviously.
Yeah, absolutely.
And they're desperate, and the tension levels are very, very high.
There's a lot of fighting between families, stealing food.
It's very difficult to describe how tense everything was the whole time and ending up being often very, very dangerous.
There were multiple fights we saw.
And this is just born out of desperation trying to get food.
I mean, with genocide, sorry, go on.
So starving to death, some of them.
You know, there are dozens of people who've died entirely and only of malnutrition.
You know, most I didn't see them because I don't treat malnutrition by itself.
I saw people dying of injuries and surgery with the background of severe malnutrition.
And of course, that was the major cause of their death.
But there are people dying only of malnutrition, literally starving to death.
I mean, you're just talking about that kind of breakdown of society, basically.
I mean, with genocide, we talk about the people in whole or in part.
And it's very clear and striking.
If you starve an entire people, then just the very fabric of society just disintegrates.
Yeah, absolutely.
And of course, that's been the, in my view, what I've witnessed, the very, very clear, deliberate policy of the Israeli military to destroy the whole infrastructure of living in Gaza.
I mean, we talked previously when you interviewed me about the deliberate destruction of hospitals, the complete disablement of hospitals, not just bombing hospitals, but dismantling all the apparatus in hospitals, dismantling the dialysis machines, the scanners, the laboratories, the targeting of healthcare workers and killing of healthcare workers, the abduction and torturing of healthcare workers, the destruction of the agricultural system in Gaza,
the destruction of the fishing system, the targeting of the desalination plants, everything.
The education system, the universe has all been destroyed.
It's a very deliberate dismantling of the whole infrastructure of living in Gaza to make it uninhabitable and to make them want to leave.
I mean, having been deliberate strategy of genocide?
I think it absolutely is a very, very deliberate dismantling of the whole of Gaza to ethnically cleanse it as part of their genocide to completely eradicate the population from Gaza.
I mean, just a couple of other things.
There was journalist who took part in these flights, dropping Gaza, which people should be clear is a pinprick of support, very inefficiently distributed because it's dropped in, you know, it's not based on people's needs, often very dangerous areas and has actually killed people by landing on their heads.
But they were barred from filming what was below them.
And if they did, they said then they would cancel those A-flights, the Israeli military.
I mean, that itself just speaks to an attempt to just prevent people from seeing what they've done.
I mean, is this just, look, we see the pictures, we do see images of Gaza.
It's beyond, you know, there's only so much she says from this distance.
Like the amazing work of Palestinian journalists who'd been slaughtered in the biggest slaughter of journalists in human history.
I mean, is it just, we're talking apocalyptic ruin?
Is that what we're talking here?
Absolutely, Owen.
I mean, it is apocalyptic.
The day we left Gaza last week, they'd massively increased the ground offensive in Deir al-Bala, you'll remember.
We nearly didn't, we were told we weren't going to get out, actually.
We just managed to get out.
But we had to divert to avoid Deir al-Bala.
We went quite far north, just almost up to Gaza City, and then we went across to the border.
And it was like a sort of dystopian Mad Max films when you saw this just complete destruction of the land.
I've never seen anything like it.
I mean, there's mass destruction in the south, mass destruction, but this was on a different level.
Every single building raised to the ground.
You know, a few people straggling around, walking around.
It was the destruction is on a scale that's almost unimaginable.
And then now, and Rafa's exactly the same.
And they're doing it to Hanunis and the whole of the red zone now.
So, you know, and I think it's something like 86% or something of the whole of Gaza is now occupied by Israel under military control.
Just, again, the so-called safe area, Al-Mawasi and Deir al-Bala, the two areas which they claimed was safe.
But of course, they're being bombed.
The tents are being bombed in Al-Mawasi every single day.
Deir al-Bala is now being invaded and taken over.
One of the scrub nurses I used to work with at Nassau Hospital two weeks ago took two days off and went back to his tent.
And he said, I'm going to my tent in Al-Muwasi for a bit of chill time with my family, were his words.
And he was killed the next morning with all his children by a bomb that bombed his tent in the so-called safe area.
So nowhere is safe.
And the destruction is unfathomable.
I mean, just finally, I mean, two Israeli human rights organizations, one of Bethlehem, has just, they just added to the chorus of saying this is genocide.
The consensus of genocide and Holocaust scholars, including in Israel itself, say this is genocide, as everyone from Amnesty International as well to Med Saint Saint-Frontier.
To those at this point, after, what, 22 months, 21, 22 months, who say this isn't genocide, based on your experiences, what would you say to those people?
Well, I think they're either being profoundly disingenuous or deliberately lying.
I mean, there can be no doubt there's a genocide.
I think enough people have called it out.
And I think our government needs to be honest and call this out and say what it is.
They were more than happy to do so when they were describing what Putin was doing to Ukraine.
But it is the evidence I have seen with my own eyes and many, many others, it is indisputably a genocide.
And people need to be honest and face up to that.
Nicolas, it was such a privilege speaking to you.
Very, very difficult listening to that, but very, very necessary.
This has been done in our name.
We're still providing the crucial components to F-35 jets, which are slaughtering people in Gaza.
And we're trading with Israel £4 billion or so a year.
We're not imposing sweeping sanctions against the Israeli state.
I mean, it's this monstrous crime of the century, and you've borne you've borne witness to it.
I can't imagine what that must be like, but you speak so brilliantly and eloquently.
It's so important to hear you.
So, for everyone listening, do share the video, press like, subscribe, leave your comments.
Then, more people will listen to Nick, which is what we want people to do, obviously.
But, Nick, honestly, it's such an honor to speak to you.
And, and again, it's difficult for me to put into words what to even say to you, having endured some of the worst possible experiences that any human can possibly bear witness to.
But you've you should history will remember what you and of course the Palestinian doctors and nurses and medical staff have done during this great crime.
So, thank you.
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