17-07-2025
Malnutrition surging in Gaza as snipers target ‘heads, legs and genitals', says Oxford surgeon
Severe malnutrition is spreading in Gaza and aid distributions supposed to stop famine have instead become a 'death trap', a top British surgeon has said.
Professor Nick Maynard, a Oxford-based gastrointestinal surgeon currently in Gaza, added that snipers were deliberately targeting 'certain body parts on different days, such as the head, legs or genitals' near US-Israeli run aid distribution points.
Prof Maynard said 'unprecedented levels' of severe malnutrition were directly contributing to preventable deaths among patients receiving surgery.
'The malnutrition I'm seeing here is indescribably bad. It's much, much worse now than a year ago'.
He added that colleagues he worked with a year ago were barely recognisable, having lost 20-30 kg due to severe food shortages. Critically, he said injured patients were dying because malnutrition was preventing them from healing properly.
'The repairs that we carry out fall to pieces, patients get terrible infections, and they die. I have never had so many patients die because they can't get enough food to recover,' he said.
Prof Maynard said the Nasser hospital, in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, where he is currently based, had almost completely run out of intravenous liquid fluids, used to treat severely malnourished children. He added that four infants recently died from malnutrition in the neonatal ward.
'I saw a seven-month-old who looked like a newborn. The expression 'skin and bones' doesn't do it justice,' he said.
Prof Maynard added that snipers appear to be targeting body parts including genitals and legs near the controversial US-Israeli Gaza Humanitarian Foundation 's (GHF) food aid collection points in southern and central Gaza
'The medical teams here have also been seeing a clear pattern of people being shot in certain body parts on different days, such as the head, legs or genitals, which seems to indicate deliberate targeting,' said Prof Maynard.
'These are mainly from the militarised distribution points, where starving civilians are going to try and get food but then report getting targeted by Israeli soldiers or quadcopters.'
Local medics have also reported a pattern of snipers targeting Palestinians in the backside, according to the BBC.
GHF, the Israeli-backed American organisation, limits food distribution to four fixed sites in southern and central Gaza, all guarded by private American security contractors and Israeli soldiers, in a move designed to wrest distribution away from aid groups led by the UN.
Israel and the US have been criticised over near-daily shootings near the distribution sites, which have killed 875 Palestinians seeking food since May, according to the UN human rights office.
Israeli and international news organisations have talked to IDF reservists and a contractor working for GHF who confirmed that civilians were being fired on.
Prof Maynard called the distribution sites 'death traps', saying he has mostly operated on young teenage boys who were trying to retrieve food for their families.
'A twelve-year-old boy I was operating on died from his injuries on the operating table – he had been shot through the chest,' said Prof Maynard.
'The enforced malnutrition and attacks on civilians we are witnessing will kill many more thousands of people if not stopped,' he said, adding that 'getting adequate food and aid into Gaza is essential.'
'The fact the world is letting Israel get away with this is deeply upsetting, something must be done to stop this collective punishment of the population of Gaza.'
Gaza's more than 2 million Palestinians are living through a catastrophic humanitarian crisis, and the territory is teetering on the edge of famine, according to food security experts.
Unrwa, the UN Relief Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, recently reported one in 10 children brought to its clinics were malnourished, adding that the condition surged amid severe shortages of nutrition supplies.
Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), the medical NGO, said their teams are witnessing the highest levels of acute malnutrition ever recorded in two facilities in Gaza.
Numbers of malnutrition in the Gaza City clinic, north of the enclave, almost quadrupled in less than two months, with cases soaring from more than 290 cases in May to over 980 cases at the beginning of July, said MSF.
'This is the first time we have witnessed such a severe scale of malnutrition cases in Gaza,' said Mohammed Abu Mughaisib, MSF deputy medical coordinator in Gaza.
'The starvation of people in Gaza is intentional, it can end tomorrow if the Israeli authorities allow food in at scale.'
