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A British Medical Doctor Provides an Eyewitness Account of the Horrors in Gaza
Starvation and malnutrition are only part of the story
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This will be a brief post.
The accusations fly back and forth between Israel and its critics about whether malnutrition and starvation exist in Gaza. An important point of contention centers on whether the Netanyahu government has been deliberately erecting obstacles to the entry into Gaza of food, nutritional supplements, and medicine—to mention but a few of the bare essentials Gazans need to survive. The numerous photographs of skeletal children and increasing signs of famine attest to just how serious the crisis is.
To make matters even worse, Netanyahu’s war cabinet has now decided to take control of the entire Gaza Strip. (Israel already controls 75 percent of the territory, according to the IDF.) Israel’s placement of three out of the four supply stations, all run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation—an Orwellian name given its record, an admixture of incompetence and brutality—in Gaza’s deep south appears to be part of a plan by Netanyahu’s government to force people to that location. (The supply station furthest north is in the center of the Strip: map here.) Israel Katz, the Defense Minister, has said that Israel will build enclosures—to empty what he calls a “humanitarian zone”—in what’s left of Rafah, just north of Gaza’s border with Egypt, to confine people to a small area.
Because some of the far-right members of the Israeli cabinet have been speaking openly about pushing Gazans out of their homeland, we have to wonder whether the plan for a confinement area in southern Gaza is meant to enable mass ethnic cleansing. The hardliners, notably National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, have already called for mass deportation, which they describe as “voluntary.”
Moreover, the idea of emptying Gaza has wider appeal within the Israeli political establishment. The head of Mossad, David Barnea, told Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Special Envoy to the Middle East, that Israel has been in touch with Indonesia, Libya, and Somalia about taking in Gazans. (The latter two places have in recent years been ravaged by anarchy, bloodletting, and, in the case of Somalia, even famine.) As far as I am aware, none of these countries has confirmed that they are willing to be part of this scheme.
None of this bothers our political leaders. House Speaker Mike Johnson and his wife were in the West Bank recently, together with other senior GOP legislators. They planted a tree there, and Johnson promised to ensure that the territory will be referred to in official American parlance as Judea and Samaria, which he declared “the rightful property of the Jewish people. Of course, the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, was on hand during Johnson’s meeting with Netanyahu, which took place in West Bank settlement of Shiloh. This as a humanitarian catastrophe unfolds in Gaza, not far away.
Because of the difficulties involved in visiting Gaza, we have had very few eyewitness accounts of the magnitude of the food crisis and the ways in which essential supplies are being distributed and in what quantities. Ditto the extent of malnutrition among children.
That’s why it’s worth listening to Dr. Nick Maynard, an Oxford University surgeon who has worked as a volunteer in Gaza multiple times between 2010 and 2025. He appeared Wednesday on Zeteo but I have been unable to find a link to that interview accessible to non-subscribers. What Maynard (and other doctors who have worked in Gaza recently) recounts is denounced by the Israeli government denounces as a smear campaign that’s recycling Hamas’s propaganda. You can decide after watching Nick Maynard’s first-hand account. Here’s the link to one video, and here’s another, which is longer.
My next post will be on the trajectory of the war in Ukraine in light of Trump’s most recent efforts to end the fighting.