Editor’s Note: In this episode, Tucker Carlson sits down with Dr. Nick Maynard, an Oxford-educated surgeon who recently returned from the frontlines of the conflict in Gaza. The interview explores the doctor’s firsthand observations of attacks on hospitals, the treatment of Palestinian civilians, and the deeper historical and political context surrounding international responses to humanitarian crises. (May 28, 2026)
TRANSCRIPT:
The Rwandan Genocide and the World’s Silence
TUCKER CARLSON: Back in April of 1994, some of the worst atrocities of the modern era broke out in the landlocked Central African country of Rwanda. To make a very complicated story short, the dominant tribe in Rwanda, the Hutu tribe, which controlled the government, had the majority of the population, for a bunch of different reasons rose up under the direction of their leaders and attempted to exterminate the minority tribe in the nation called the Tutsis.
And for 100 days, they did their best. They killed hundreds of thousands of them, more than half a million of them, many with machetes or burned alive or buried alive. And they raped even more than that. And not just raped, but literally corralled AIDS patients in AIDS hospitals and sent them out to rape Tutsi women and to infect them with HIV, which they did.
It was horrifying. And as the details of what happened during what is now referred to as the Rwandan genocide filtered out to the rest of the world, people were stunned and nauseated by it and really bewildered that something like this could happen not that long after the most famous genocide in history in the 1940s in Europe, to which we’d all said, well, that could never happen again.
The World Knew and Did Nothing
Well, it did. A version of it did happen in Rwanda in 1994. But what was even more distressing and in some ways shocking was that the world knew it was happening as it happened and did nothing to stop it, and in most cases said nothing about it even when it was in progress.
From the very beginning, 4 days after the genocide in Rwanda started, a Swiss journalist in Kigali, the capital, published a piece in a French newspaper saying, “I have interviewed aid officials and there’s a genocide going on in Rwanda.” This ran in a Western paper and then was picked up in other Western papers, but no one did anything.
So the Red Cross knew it was happening. The UN knew it was happening. There were UN troops in Rwanda. The French government knew it was happening. There were French troops there. The nation of Israel knew it was happening. Israel had been a supporter of the Hutu government for decades. In fact, it seems pretty obvious that some of the bullets and grenades used to murder Tutsis were sold to the Hutu government by the Israelis.
And in fact, there’s some evidence apparently that the Israeli government sold weapons to the Hutu government during the genocide, which were used to murder Tutsis. We say apparently because the documents surrounding this have been classified. They’re under seal per orders of an Israeli court on the grounds that were they to become public, it would be bad for Israel’s image globally.
So the Israelis knew, and the Clinton administration famously knew it was happening, but for domestic political reasons didn’t act to stop it. So the lesson is something horrible, in fact genocide, can happen. The world can know it’s happening. And allow it to happen. That’s the lesson.
Samantha Power and “A Problem from Hell”
And it’s a lesson that a young Harvard Law student called Samantha Power thought about a lot as she was getting her degree in Cambridge. How can a genocide take place within living memory of the Second World War and the civilized world does nothing about it?
Well, in 2002, she published a book on that exact question. The book was called A Problem from Hell. It won the Pulitzer Prize and all kinds of other prizes. And Samantha Power’s case was pretty simple: the world cannot allow genocide to happen again. If people find out this is happening, they have to act. That’s the mark of civilization. Do you stop mass murder of civilians on ethnic grounds? Genocide. And if you don’t, then you’re not civilized.
The United States, she wrote, has a moral obligation to intervene with force if it determines that a genocide is underway. What’s the point of having the world’s largest military if you can’t at least try to prevent a genocide?
Well, as noted, she was lauded for this. The book changed her life. She became one of the most famous people in the world, and in a fairly short period of time, a close advisor to then-candidate Barack Obama. He was elected in 2008 and promptly made her the chairman of the Atrocity Prevention Board. You may not have known such a thing existed, but it does. It’s an interagency group. It still exists, name slightly different, but its purpose is in the name: preventing atrocities, using the power of the U.S. government to prevent atrocities.
Well, there weren’t many well-publicized genocides during the first Obama term, but Samantha Power stuck around. She wound up teaching at Harvard Law School, and then Biden is elected or becomes president in 2020, and she goes back into the White House. At this point, she is the head of USAID, the United States Agency for International Development. She also has a seat on the National Security Council. She is a high-level foreign policy person in the Biden administration.
Samantha Power’s Silence on Gaza
Well, it just so happens that during her time there, the thing that she warned about, wrote about, actually happened — another genocide. This one took place in Gaza, the territory that Israel has controlled, formerly part of Egypt, since 1967. And shortly after the attacks by Hamas into southern Israel in October of 2023, Israel decided to murder as many people as it possibly could in Gaza with the aim of getting the entire population to leave Gaza so Israel could take over Gaza.
Now, we’re not guessing about this because Israeli officials said out loud, this is our plan.
Two interesting things. Samantha Power, famous for opposing genocide, said not a word about this. Of course, by this point, 30 years after the Rwandan genocide, Samantha Power’s view of genocide appeared to have changed. So the way to fight genocide really was to empower women and girls in the LGBT community. Fight the patriarchy. That’s how you prevent genocide. But when an actual genocide occurred on her watch, as someone with a seat on the National Security Council, Samantha Power did and said nothing.
She’s now back at Harvard Law School, but she has actually been asked about this. “You’re the genocide lady, but you did nothing to stop genocide after writing a book scolding the rest of us for doing nothing to stop genocide. Why is that?” She didn’t respond well. “I’m not here to answer questions like that,” she said. You can look it up. It’s an amazing exchange.
What she did not say was, “You’re absolutely right, I wrote a book saying the civilized world can’t allow genocide to happen, and then I allowed it to happen.” But that’s exactly what she did.
Israel’s Stated Intent from the Beginning
But what’s even more interesting is that she’s not alone in this. Everybody knew from the first week after October 7th that Israel planned to commit genocide, traditionally defined genocide, targeting a population because of their bloodline and trying to exterminate or move them. Everyone knew this because Israel announced it twice in October of 2023.
The Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, said out loud in a public speech, “the Palestinians are Amalek.” Amalek, a reference that many in the West didn’t get but everyone in the region understood. And it’s a reference to 1 Samuel 15, the first verses in it, which you should read because it tells you a lot about what Israel’s doing now. But those verses describe God’s command to eliminate a tribe called the Amalekites. And not just the draft-age men, but all of them, including children and infants. All of them. Kill all of them. Destroy all of their property. Slay all of their animals. This is God’s command.
So when Benjamin Netanyahu describes the Palestinians as Amalek twice in the first month of the Gaza operation, you don’t need to guess what the point of this is. The point is to destroy every man, woman, and child, and infant in Gaza. And they set about doing that.
Israeli Officials Call for Extermination
But it wasn’t just Netanyahu who said that. It was a lot of different authorities in Israel. And in fact, as someone who’s been keeping a list of this for a while, it might be worth reading them just so everyone knows this isn’t blood libel. It is true.
On October 9th, so 3 days after the Hamas attacks, the defense minister of Israel, their own Pete Hegseth, described his plans for Gaza, not for Hamas, for the entire territory, for the over 2 million people who live there. And we’re quoting: “No electricity, no food will be allowed in. We are fighting human animals, not human beings, human animals.”
Well, the deputy mayor of Jerusalem that winter responded not to say, “Whoa, whoa, settle down, Defense Minister, calling your opponents animals is of course genocidal talk.” No, the Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem thought he didn’t go far enough, and he said this: “They’re not human animals, they’re not human beings, they are subhuman.” And then he said that the Palestinians of Gaza should be buried alive with bulldozers, which some ultimately apparently were.
Ben-Gvir, Matt Brooks of the Republican Jewish Coalition, carpet bomb cabinet ministers in Israel, supporters of Israel in the United States making the same case in public from the very first day — kill indiscriminately, move them out. There were discussions on the American right about what we should do with those Gazans, the people who live there. Move them to other countries, Egypt, maybe even the United States. Get them out. Kill enough of them that the rest leave. The survivors want to flee.
And so the aim was genocidal from the very first day the Israelis announced it. Israel’s supporters in the United States seconded it, amplified it. And members of the U.S. Congress on television, the people who are paying for this genocide, announced proudly, “That’s right, the Israelis have every right to kill civilians, and that’s why we are paying them and giving them weapons to do so.” Watch this.
VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: I would encourage the other side to not so lightly throw around the idea of innocent Palestinian civilians, as is frequently said. I don’t think we would so lightly throw around the term innocent Nazi civilians during World War II.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: In World War II, we did not negotiate a surrender with the Nazis. We did not negotiate a surrender with the Japanese. We nuked the Japanese twice in order to get unconditional surrender. That needs to be the same here.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Many people in this part of the world say what happened in Gaza does not align with Christian values. Killing children, killing mothers.
REPORTER: I’ll be honest with you. Families who are not militants. Yeah, I just—
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: I don’t buy that at all.
REPORTER: Why?
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: What did we do in World War II? Did we think one minute about starving the Germans? Did we bomb every city into smithereens? So this is a war.
REPORTER: October 7th to World War II.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Yes, I am. This is an absolute existential threat to the Jewish people. We flattened Berlin. We flattened Tokyo.
REPORTER: Were we wrong to drop an atomic bomb to end the Japanese reign of terror? Were we?
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: So my view, if I were Israel, I would have probably done it the same way.
VIDEO CLIP ENDS.
Tucker Carlson Interviews British Surgeon Dr. Nick Maynard on Gaza
TUCKER CARLSON: There are no innocent Palestinian civilians. We starved the Germans. We’re proud of it. We dropped an atomic bomb on Japanese civilians. We’re proud of it. The Israelis should do the same here.
Now, if there’s another definition of genocide, intentionally targeting the innocent for murder, it would be interesting to know what it is. Keep in mind, none of these people— Brian Mast from Florida, Randy Fine from Florida, in the end, of course, Lindsey Graham from South Carolina— none of them even bothered to add the caveat, “well, Hamas supporters.” No, people who live next door to Hamas supporters, down the street from Hamas supporters, in the same region as Hamas supporters. Arabs must be killed. Because they’re Arabs.
How is that any different from Hutu radio comparing the Tutsis to cockroaches? How is the net result different? Well, it’s identical in both cases. How is it different? And this is an explicit violation of the IHRA definition of antisemitism, but it’s also true. How is this different from what the Germans did to civilians in World War II? It’s different in its scale. Thankfully. Is it different in its intent? It’s hard to see how. And if it is different, how? How is it different? Well, of course it’s not. It’s the same thing.
Samantha Power and the Contradiction of Genocide Advocacy
All of this, by the way, was going on with Samantha Power. Not to beat up on poor Samantha Power. Clearly didn’t sign up for this. She just wanted to talk about the empowerment of women and girls in the LGBT community. But how could you write a book on genocide or claim to oppose genocide or send money to a Holocaust memorial or talk about the Second World War at all and the atrocities against civilians and stand by, much less fund this while it happens. It’s hard to understand.
But not only have they— they being the supporters of the Israeli government— they’ve done both at the same time, lecturing the world about why genocide is wrong, murdering the innocent is wrong, and they’re right, and at the same time bragging about those very same things in Gaza.
Randy Fine’s Tweets: Gloating Over Civilian Deaths
Here is a now thankfully famous couple of tweets from Randy Fine of Florida gloating about the murder of civilians in Gaza. The first is a picture of a dead child killed by the Israeli government that somebody put in his Twitter feed and asked basically, “How can you sleep at night?” And he says, “Quite well, actually. Thanks for the pic!” With an exclamation point.
And the second is a story about starvation in Gaza, which is real and entirely manufactured by the Israeli government with the backstop of the American government. And Randy Fine, on seeing a picture of starving civilians, women and children, writes, “Starve away, starve away.”
So here you have sitting members of the United States Congress not simply denying genocide, but encouraging it, gloating over it, celebrating it. How did this happen? How did the rest of the United States stand by and allow the federal government to take its tax dollars to fund this? Israel could do none of this by itself. Of course it couldn’t exist without US tax dollars. It would be destroyed by its enemies. There’s no question about that.
So how exactly have members of Congress been allowed not simply to fund but to celebrate genocide here in the United States? And the answer is really simple. By a form of moral blackmail where the real criminals here are not Smotrich and Ben-Gvir and Netanyahu and the deputy mayor of Jerusalem, the people who are calling women and children who are Arabs animals who must be buried alive with bulldozers, starved to death. No, the real criminals, the people who should be in serious trouble, should go to jail, are the people who notice it, who complain about it, who object to it. Even the people who ever so mildly say, “Not my business, but I don’t want to fund this.” Those people are the people who have committed the real moral crimes.
Mark Levin and the Politics of Moral Blackmail
Hate to put this up again, but it’s such a perfect distillation. Almost everything Mark Levin says, none of it is original. All of it is the kind of most vulgar form of the talking points that everyone else is using. His are just revealing because he doesn’t hold back. Here’s Mark Levin describing people who complain about the genocide in Gaza. Watch.
VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:
MARK LEVIN: Who the hell do you think you are? Who the hell do you think you are to use these blood libels against the Jewish people, that they are indiscriminately murdering Palestinian civilians when you spew the lies of the Hamas terrorists against the Jews and unleash antisemitism in this country, around the world like we’ve never seen before. Who the hell do you think you are?
The idea that the Israeli people, that their representatives in the government are committing acts of genocide and war crimes against the Palestinians in Gaza is sickening. It’s a blood libel. Joe Biden basically using blood libel after blood libel against the Israelis that they’re killing all these civilians. They’re using the Hamas numbers. All of this will be certified. All of this will be sanctified. All the Hitler Youth on our campuses, the Hitler Youth throughout Europe, and the Hitlerians throughout Europe where the Holocaust started. This is what they’re going to take out of October 7th. The enemy is Hamas. The enemy is Iran. The enemy are those who are silent in the face of this kind of genocide. That is by the terrorists.
VIDEO CLIP ENDS:
Keep in mind that Joe Biden did nothing to stop the genocide in Gaza. Of course, he continued to allow the US government to pay for it. His criticisms were mild and in the end ineffectual. And even as we noted, his in-house genocide expert didn’t say a word about it. Biden let this happen, just as Donald Trump has let this happen and encouraged it to happen. But anyone who notices it is the real terrorist.
So what you have here is the desperate attempt, which appears to be coming to an end, of the people committing the crimes trying to remain the victim of the crime. And it’s just not sustainable. It’s not sustainable as a math question. All murder of civilians is wrong. But since we’re comparing, in what place have more civilians been murdered? Israel or Gaza? It’s not even close. It’s not even close.
And again, you don’t even need to go there. You just say it’s always wrong. It’s wrong when you do it. It’s wrong when you do it. It would be wrong if I did it. And we’re all capable of it, which is one of the deepest lessons of what’s happened in Gaza and Rwanda and Buchenwald, is that the desire to kill groups of other people is not limited to one race or religion. It’s a species of the same evil that lurks in every human heart. It’s just the way people are. And under certain circumstances, good people can do horrifying things and support horrifying things.
And they’re probably good people who support the genocide in Gaza because they’re under some kind of spell. They don’t know what they’re saying. They don’t understand the implications of it. They don’t understand the physical reality of it. Everybody is capable of evil. That’s the truth. That’s the universal lesson.
But supporters of Israel don’t believe in anything that’s universal. They believe that there is one set of rules for the country they admire and another set for the world. “When we do it, it’s not wrong. When you do it, it is wrong. In fact, when you complain about our doing it, it’s doubly wrong.” And that just can’t last because it’s self-evidently absurd and it won’t last. And anyone who’s defended it or helped pay for it will face at the very least a reckoning at the end, and maybe sooner, one hopes.
Introducing Dr. Nick Maynard: A Witness to Gaza
But in the meantime, because this is a process of stages, it might help just to establish what happened in Gaza. And of course, we’re not really sure even now. There are more journalists operating in Kigali, Rwanda, without restriction in 1994 than there are in Gaza today. I knew one of them well. A Western journalist. He was never molested by anybody. The Hutu militia never hurt him. He stood by and watched the whole thing and he reported on it. That is not the case in Gaza. Hundreds of journalists have been murdered by the Israeli government in Gaza, and the purpose of killing them, of course, was to prevent the rest of the world from knowing what happened there.
But some people have been witnesses to this, and we want you to hear the interview that we just did with a man called Nick Maynard, who was one of those witnesses. Because we think that his account, which is entirely nonpolitical or even polemical, is instead reliable. He’s a physician from Oxford at the university in the UK. He’s a cancer doctor. And for a number of years, and he’ll explain it in just a moment, he has been in and out of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza in recent years, particularly in Gaza, both before and after October 7th.
And the things he’s seen there are so horrifying that they can’t really be rebutted. No one can look at the man you’re about to see and say, “Oh, he’s a secret member of Islamic Jihad, probably a closet Shiite.” No, he’s a British cancer doctor in his 60s who does believe in universal principles. You shouldn’t kill the innocent because they’re innocent. They’ve done nothing wrong. And when you do, you should be held to account for it. He’s not an anti-Semite. He doesn’t hate the Jews. Like a lot of Jews around the world, he is horrified by what’s happening in Gaza, and he has the bravery to describe it.
So without delay, here is Dr. Nick Maynard of Oxford with an account of what he has seen and the people he knows personally who’ve been murdered by the Israeli government during the longest genocide in this world since 1945. Watch.
Dr., thank you for doing this. So you’re a medical professor at Oxford. I think you have one of the world’s most respectable jobs, most respected jobs, certainly. And now you are speaking about what you have seen in the most contentious, controversial conflict in the world. How did you decide to speak about what you saw in Gaza? In fact, how did you wind up going to Gaza in the first place?
Dr. Maynard’s First Visit to Gaza
DR. NICK MAYNARD: So it was real pure serendipity that I ended up going to Gaza in many ways. I was invited more than 20 years ago, maybe in 2006, to go to the West Bank to teach medical students at Al-Quds University in Jerusalem, in Ramallah and Hebron, and did that on a very ad hoc basis for a few years. And then I was asked to do the same in Gaza. And I leapt at the opportunity because I’d already sort of fallen in love with the Palestinian people. I’d loved visiting the West Bank. So I went to Gaza for the first—
TUCKER CARLSON: What did you like? It’s weird maybe for Americans to hear that because the Palestinians have been so thoroughly maligned by our media for so long that people think of them as violent and primitive. What did you like about the Palestinians?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: They’re the kindest people I’ve met. They’re profoundly resilient, particularly in Gaza, but they’re generous, they’re kind, very welcoming. I’ve always been treated wonderfully by them. And when you go to Gaza, I mean, you see that even on a different level yet again. They are incredibly resilient, incredibly resourceful, but they are the kindest, most generous-hearted, most beautiful people I’ve ever met in the world.
TUCKER CARLSON: Really?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Absolutely correct.
TUCKER CARLSON: I can’t overstate the degree to which Americans have been told for decades that the people in Gaza are barely human. And that was not— when did you first go?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: I went to Gaza for the first time in 2010, and it was just an initial sort of trip to teach. And then ever since then, I’ve been taking a team of doctors from Oxford to teach medical students there.
TUCKER CARLSON: What was Gaza like? Can you describe it in 2010?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Yeah, it was under occupation. So it’s been variously described as a large prison or concentration camp. And people might take issue with that terminology, but what lies behind that is the fact that the 99% plus of the population have never ever been able to leave their country. So they are in prison there. So we went in through the most remarkable security from Israel. We went through the Erez crossing in northern Gaza. That first trip took us most of the day to get through the security. And we had 10 days, I think, in Gaza.
TUCKER CARLSON: Wait, as a Western physician, it took you most of the day to get from Israel into Gaza?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Yeah.
Crossing Into Gaza: Security, Infrastructure, and the Healthcare System
TUCKER CARLSON: Because the Israeli security?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Because the Israeli security. It took hours getting through the most remarkably intense security. Being grilled repeatedly about why we were going there. What we were doing, why we were going there, why didn’t we go to Africa instead? Why were we going to Gaza? We wanted to help people. Why didn’t we go to African countries? Literally those sort of questions we were being asked.
TUCKER CARLSON: Is this the same border that Hamas came over on October 7th?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: No. So Erez crossing is the very top of Gaza, the northern border with Israel. Hamas came out through the southern, perhaps near the bottom of Gaza. Erez crossing has been— was destroyed very early on in this conflict. So it’s not being used at all. Certainly none of the humanitarian teams that have gone in have gone in through that at all. It’s a sort of no-pass area.
But you get into Gaza, and I remember vividly my first visit there in 2010, meeting these people who were just so welcoming. They were so delighted that we’d gone to visit them. And the hospitality was just remarkable. And that’s been the way ever since. And indeed, every year I’ve been going there, I’ve been taking new people most times. And everyone falls in love with the Palestinian people. They all want to go back.
So in those early years, I was just teaching every year. And I’ve been doing that until 2022. In fact, we had a teaching trip planned for November ’23, and that was clearly cancelled. But I’ve also been involved separate to that in carrying out and teaching cancer surgery. That’s what I do in Oxford. So helping them develop their cancer services and teaching my specialty of cancer as well.
Gaza Before October 7th: Infrastructure and Daily Life
TUCKER CARLSON: What did it look like in 2010? It was occupied, as you said, but what was the infrastructure like? Gaza City, how would you describe it?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: I mean, there was vast amounts of wreckage of destroyed buildings because this was not— it’s worth pointing out that every single trip I’ve ever been into Gaza, and I’ve been many times in those 18 to 16 years, I’ve seen aerial bombardments. So it’s a way of life there. Every trip I’ve— by Israel, aerial bombardments on Gaza by the Israeli Air Force.
So this was— I was there in 2010, not long after the 2008 massive military assault on Gaza. So the destruction you see is remarkable. There’s loads of buildings have been destroyed. And each time you go, you see more of that. I remember going in in 2015, just after 2014 Operation Protective Edge, which you may remember, which was about a 58-day military assault. The destruction of buildings was just like something I’d never seen before.
So you have this sort of mixture of mass destruction, but you see Gazans rebuilding the whole time. They’re there rebuilding their destroyed houses yet again. But it’s a busy, thriving place. You go down to Gaza City where the harbour is, it’s busy. There are markets there, there are fishing boats there. They are desperate all the time to get back to normal living.
But the resources are very limited. I mean, particularly in the healthcare system there, which is where I’ve been working. They never have enough resources. Their economy has almost been completely disabled by Israel. All that time. So they have very limited resources for everything, for all aspects of living there, but particularly in the healthcare structure.
TUCKER CARLSON: So in 2010, or let’s just say before October 7th, 2023, how would you just—
DR. NICK MAYNARD: What was the state of the healthcare system in Gaza? It was— I mean, they practice high-quality medicine. The doctors, the nurses, the dietitians, the physiotherapists, the occupational therapists — remarkably talented. And I was teaching the students for years. I know how bright these kids are. They’re just remarkably bright. They know so much. A lot of it was sort of didactic teaching, online teaching, which we tried to improve on in our sort of face-to-face teaching. So their knowledge is remarkable. They practice medicine at a very high level, but they have very limited resources.
So in my specialty in cancer surgery, they didn’t have the resources to do absolutely everything. Many patients had to— the doctors had to apply to get them transferred, for example, to the West Bank or to Jordan or sometimes into Israel to have specialist treatment that couldn’t be carried out in Gaza. So they had to work with very limited resources.
Cancer Patients and the Struggle to Leave Gaza for Treatment
TUCKER CARLSON: How hard was it for cancer patients to leave Gaza for treatment?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Very difficult. So there was a very laborious application process. The Ministry of Health had to apply to the Israeli authorities. That took on average about 3 months for each application to go through. These are all people with life-threatening, time-critical illnesses. So that 3 months, that cancer will change a lot.
Of those applicants, about two-thirds would get through and a third would be rejected. So these are people again with life-threatening illnesses which cannot be treated in Gaza. One in three were being rejected. So they would inevitably die. And even if they were granted permission, they were often sent out alone. So kids sent out for treatment for their brain tumor, for example, might be sent by themselves without any parent accompanying them.
TUCKER CARLSON: Were these kids with a documented history of terrorism?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Not at all. Not at all.
TUCKER CARLSON: Why would the Israelis prevent a child with a brain tumor from getting treatment? Not at their expense. What’s the thinking there?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: I don’t know what the thinking is. I mean, there were some patients who were accepted into Israeli hospitals, and there are many examples of that. But why some were turned down, some were accepted, I have no idea. But it is a fact that many people were rejected despite needing life-threatening, life-saving treatment.
Gaza’s Hospitals: Destruction of the Healthcare Infrastructure
TUCKER CARLSON: How many hospitals were in Gaza?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: The United Nations tells us there’s 36 hospitals in Gaza, but some of them are very, very small clinics. So there are probably 4, or there were 4 major hospitals in Gaza: the Indonesian Hospital in the north, Shifa Hospital, which is the most famous iconic hospital in Gaza, in Gaza City, and then the European Gaza Hospital and Nasser Hospital in the south. Of those, Nasser Hospital, the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Yunis, where I was based most recently, is the only remaining large hospital in Gaza. And even that is very significantly part disabled.
TUCKER CARLSON: What happened to the others?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: They’ve been destroyed.
TUCKER CARLSON: Why?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: I think this is part of the— I mean, the whole healthcare infrastructure has been targeted in Gaza repeatedly over many years. I mean, I’ve been in hospitals being bombed as long ago as 2014. But in this—
TUCKER CARLSON: You were in the hospital while it was bombed?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: No, I was visiting a hospital before, and then I visited after being bombed. I’ve been in hospitals that have been bombed in this current conflict, but not prior to then.
I think every single hospital has been attacked. I mean, nearly 2,000 healthcare workers have been killed during this conflict, a far greater proportion than any other conflict in living memory. 75 Gaza healthcare workers have been killed per 100,000 capita of population. 75 — the equivalent number in Ukraine is 0.8. In all the other conflicts, it’s single figures of healthcare workers per 100,000 population. In Gaza, it’s 75.
So there’s been a grossly disproportionate killing of healthcare workers. All the hospitals have been attacked. And I think this is— I mean, I’m going to be talking to you about what I’ve seen with my own eyes. The disproportionate attack on the healthcare system, I think, has been a deliberate part of the Israeli policy to dismantle the whole infrastructure of living in Gaza.
Bombed While Operating: A First-Hand Account
TUCKER CARLSON: So you don’t think those hospitals were collateral damage? These were accidental attacks?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: I think they were deliberate attacks. And I’ve been in— I mean, I was in Al-Aqsa Hospital when it was attacked.
On my first couple of trips there, before the Rafah crossing was destroyed in May 2024, the early trips I took out there since October 7th, we went in through Rafah, we crossed from Egypt across the Sinai. And on that very first trip, we went in and we were the very first emergency team that got into Gaza. And we stayed actually on that occasion in a safe house rather than in the hospital.
Each day, our Gazan staff colleagues communicated with COGAT, which is the liaison branch of the Israeli Army, to check that the route going to the hospital, the hospital itself, was deconflicted. So there was a sort of a, what we thought was a very robust deconfliction process where the Israeli military would know that we were driving along such and such a road, we were going to work in such and such a hospital, and we would be safe. That was naive of us, clearly.
You’ll remember about the World Central Kitchen convoy that got bombed. That was the first very publicized example of the deconfliction process breaking down. Al-Aqsa Hospital — I was operating in the operating theater one day, it was January 5th, 2024. I remember the day well, operating on a victim of a bomb explosion, and an Israeli missile attack hit the intensive care unit right next to where I was working. So we had to—
TUCKER CARLSON: While you were operating?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: While I was operating. So we finished the operation, we had to evacuate the hospital. Then MSF had a team there. All the foreign aid workers had to evacuate to go back to our safe house, and that hospital rapidly becomes disabled.
So there are multiple examples of hospitals being attacked. These are not collateral damage. I mean, the propaganda we hear from the Israeli spokespeople is always, well, these are either collateral damage or they are being used as Hamas command centers and we’re just targeting Hamas. And they’ve never provided any remotely credible or verifiable evidence to support those contentions.
No Evidence of Hamas Military Activity in Hospitals
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, as a doctor who’s operated in these hospitals, did you notice Hamas command meetings going on while you were there?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Not at all. And since October 7th, I’ve been in 2 hospitals, but prior to then I’ve worked in all the major hospitals. I’ve had unlimited access throughout all these hospitals. And I’ve been to every square inch of these hospitals.
Nasser Medical Complex, it was bombed soon after I left most recently. I walked around every single part of the hospital and I’ve never seen anything. I’ve seen no evidence of Hamas military activity. Now, I clearly cannot talk about what’s going on in any tunnels because I didn’t go into any tunnels. I clearly can’t talk about what’s going on in the hospital outbuilding 100 meters away or 75 meters away. And there may be that there were Hamas there. I have no idea. I can bear witness to what I have seen.
But of course, the Israeli military are not bombing those outbuildings. They’ve been bombing the clinical areas of these hospitals where there have been patients, where there have been doctors, where there have been medical students I had been teaching a few weeks previously who were killed in the latest attack on Nasser Hospital. So they are targeting the clinical areas. And I can say with absolute clarity, and indeed all my colleagues have been out there, none of us have seen any evidence of Hamas military activity.
Comparing Gaza to Ukraine: Targeting Hospitals as a War Crime
TUCKER CARLSON: For comparison, again, you gave the numbers — the number of medical personnel have been killed in the Russia-Ukraine war, and it’s a tiny fraction proportionally of the number who have been killed by the Israelis. How many hospitals have been totally blown up in that war, Russia-Ukraine, do you think?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: I don’t know. I mean, there has been significant targeting of Ukrainian hospitals as well. And the proportion of healthcare workers killed and hospitals killed in Ukraine is not as bad as Gaza, but it’s much more than many previous conflicts. So both those two current conflicts stand out in that respect. But the statistics would say that Gaza is the worst of—
TUCKER CARLSON: Targeting hospitals is a war crime, correct?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Yeah.
TUCKER CARLSON: How many people do you know who’ve been killed?
The Killing and Detention of Healthcare Workers
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Many. I mean, close friends, I’d say probably a dozen close friends have been killed.
TUCKER CARLSON: Killed?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Killed. Yeah. I mean, one young plastic surgeon who I knew, who I’d worked with in May 2023, when I was at Shefa Hospital, he was executed. And I think— and I use that word very carefully— he was discovered about a mile from Shefa Hospital, with his mother. They were both— had their hands handcuffed behind their backs, and they both had bullet wounds in the brains. So I’ve had friends who’ve been bombed, I’ve had friends—
TUCKER CARLSON: And he was a plastic surgeon.
DR. NICK MAYNARD: He was a plastic surgeon.
TUCKER CARLSON: Why was he executed?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Well, I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know what goes on behind this. What I can tell you is that when Shefa Hospital was— Shefa Hospital’s been destroyed effectively twice during this war, but when it was invaded initially, maybe 2 years ago, the staff were all displaced, including very, very close friends of mine. And when they were allowed back in, when the Israeli military left after a few weeks, they discovered the dead bodies of 300 civilians in the hospital, some patients, some staff, many of them handcuffed with their hands behind their back, many of them with bullet wounds on the head, including this friend of mine.
So there are multiple examples of people, of healthcare staff who’ve been killed, healthcare staff who’ve been abducted. I think the latest figure is nearly 500 healthcare workers have been abducted, illegally detained without charge. Many of them by the Israeli military, into the Israeli prison system. Multiple examples of them being tortured. This has all been documented by a group called Healthcare Workers Watch. You can Google it. They produced a document called “The Killing and Detention of Gazan Healthcare Workers,” and there are multiple examples of people being tortured to death.
Torture and Detention of Healthcare Workers
TUCKER CARLSON: Tortured to death?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Absolutely. So an iconic orthopedic surgeon who I didn’t know well, but I had met, and in fact I had coffee with him in May 2023, he was tortured to death. And in fact, a Sky Television investigative journalist interviewed fellow detainees and did some remarkable investigative journalism. This is all in the public domain, and described how this surgeon’s mode of torture was being raped to death. He’d been serially raped on a daily basis for 2 weeks prior to his dying. His body’s never been returned.
I’ve taken detailed testimonies from healthcare workers who’ve been in Israeli prisons and have been tortured. They survived. I’ve taken video and audio testimonies and they’ve described to me their modes of torture. How their genitals were repeatedly attacked. Specifically, they were electrocuted through their genitals. They underwent severe psychological torture. They were blindfolded for 60 days in a row. They were handcuffed. They were not allowed to lie down. They were on their knees or sitting for 60 days nonstop, beaten regularly, electrocuted. Awful things.
And the Healthcare Workers Watch document— your listeners can Google that. There are all the different modes of torture, all of which were carried out by the Israeli government, by the Israeli prison service guards and military. And the evidence is there: detailed testimonies from fellow detainees, from families, indeed some testimonies from the Israeli prison service staff as well. And again, this has all been submitted to the international courts.
Dogs Used as Weapons in Hospitals
TUCKER CARLSON: The New York Times recently ran a piece saying that Palestinian prisoners had been raped with dogs in Israeli prisons. And the response in the American media, to the extent there was response, was to accuse the writer of blood libel against all Jews. “This is like accusing rabbis of poisoning wells. It was basically Nazi propaganda.” That was the response. Does that sound plausible to you?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: It does sound plausible. I did not hear any examples of that, but what I have heard about and what I’ve taken detailed testimony of are some of the most appalling examples of torture. I’ve heard no examples of dogs raping the prisoners, but I have heard multiple examples of dogs being used as weapons. You’ll be familiar with the drone warfare, the quadcopters with cameras and guns. Well, they have dogs who are trained to go into the hospitals with cameras and guns on their back and attacking people. And my colleague, whom I took a detailed testimony, has described that in great detail.
TUCKER CARLSON: Dogs with guns on their backs?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Dogs with cameras and guns on their backs, being trained to go into hospitals and shoot people. I’ve heard multiple examples of that.
TUCKER CARLSON: Of a living dog.
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Living dogs who are trained. They go into wherever, and then there’s someone remotely controlling the camera and the guns.
TUCKER CARLSON: If you told me that it happened in a North Korean prison camp, I would have trouble believing you. You’re saying the Israeli government did this.
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Well, I’m telling you what I have taken testimony of, of a friend of mine who witnessed this on multiple occasions.
Bringing Evidence to Western Governments
TUCKER CARLSON: What do people in the— you live still in Britain— what do people in the UK say when you tell them this?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: I do talk a lot about this. I felt this obligation, having witnessed all these atrocities, that I have to share this with everyone. I’ve done a lot of media interviews. I’ve done a lot of lectures at medical conferences, at laypeople’s conferences, and I’ve met a lot of our senior politicians. And I’m not alone. A lot of people have done this. A lot of my colleagues have done this. A lot of US doctors have done this. US doctors, British doctors, we’ve all publicly written to our governments. A few of us wrote a very detailed dossier with photographic and written evidence of what we’ve seen. We presented it to our Prime Minister. We submitted it to all the Cabinet ministers, so they know what’s going on.
I visited Washington, D.C. in the early part of this and met members of the Biden administration, with friends of mine from MedGlobal, a wonderful U.S. NGO. We went and gave this evidence. We took enlarged laminated color photographs of babies who’d been shot in the head, of children who’d lost their limbs, of children who’d been starved to death, literally. We’ve described this to the Biden administration. I’ve been to several meetings in our government, including one with the prime minister, where we’ve described what’s been going on, and it’s had no impact at all.
TUCKER CARLSON: What was your meeting with Biden officials like? What did they say?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Some of them were, by and large, very receptive. We went and met various senators as well, but then we met members of the administration. They were very receptive. We clearly met people lower down the chain. We did meet Samantha Power. She was the most senior, and I was very impressed with her. We got a very good reception and a very sympathetic reception. Of course, none of this goes anywhere. We don’t see any actions at the end of that. But by and large, the U.S. politicians we met were very sympathetic. But of course, it had no impact whatsoever.
TUCKER CARLSON: Samantha Power became famous for writing a book on genocide, “How We Can Never Allow It Again.” And then she allowed it again. So your friend who was raped to death, your friends who were tortured— why were they detained and tortured?
A Deliberate Policy to Destroy the Healthcare System
DR. NICK MAYNARD: I think there’s a clear disproportion of senior healthcare workers who’ve been taken compared to junior healthcare workers. My presumption is— I can tell you a lot of facts about what’s happened there. My interpretation is my opinion. It would seem to me, and many others who’ve witnessed all of this, that this has been a deliberate policy to destroy the healthcare system.
TUCKER CARLSON: Can you give us a specific example of someone you know who was detained and tortured? And what were the circumstances? How does that happen?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: They’re arrested within the hospitals. So my two colleagues, one of them was arrested in the Indonesian Hospital, one of them was arrested in Nasser Hospital. The Israeli military invade the hospitals. What would appear to be fairly arbitrarily, they arrest some, let others go, predominantly males.
So I’ll describe what happened in the last testimony I took. He was with about 20 or 30 other healthcare workers put in a big pit, an underground pit with no covering. They were stripped naked down to their underwear, they were blindfolded, they were handcuffed, they were left in a pit in the ground for 2 to 3 days. Then they were taken off to an Israeli prison. They were left blindfolded, they were left handcuffed, they were beaten those first few days nonstop for 12 hours at a time. Many other forms of torture we’ve just described, all along.
One of my close friends who’s one of the senior deans in the medical school there was abducted and taken away. He was only taken for, I think, 10 days and then released. But there are so many—
TUCKER CARLSON: How old is he?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: He is, I guess, late 50s. And there are photos.
TUCKER CARLSON: Not of militant age.
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Not of militant age. Absolutely. Absolutely.
TUCKER CARLSON: And what was the justification?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Well, they were continually being grilled about being Hamas members and what they had done and all that sort of stuff. Now, Hussam Abu Safiya, who’s the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, was abducted over a year ago now. He’s still under detention in an Israeli prison. His lawyers can’t get in, they can’t get in news about him. There are many people who are still there. We can only speculate as to why they are being taken and why they’re being tortured. But it seems the deliberate disproportionate detention of healthcare workers and killing of healthcare workers compared to other civilians speaks to me that there is a deliberate policy of undermining, of destroying the whole healthcare system.
TUCKER CARLSON: Are they charged with crimes? Put on trial?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Oh, no, no, no, no. None of them are charged. None of them are charged. These are all people who are detained without charge.
TUCKER CARLSON: So just completely lawless.
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Yes, but that’s been happening for, as you will know, for decades in the Palestinian territories. There are thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank who are imprisoned without charge, who’ve been imprisoned without charge. So this has been happening for a long time. But certainly the ones that I have interviewed and the ones I’ve known who’ve been told— no, there were no charges at all.
TUCKER CARLSON: And a lot of these are just adult men with families.
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Yeah. I mean, the age range of the people I know were from probably early 20s to late 50s.
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s shocking.
DR. NICK MAYNARD: It is shocking to me. And having seen this, having witnessed this, this is why I think it is important that we tell everyone what’s going on, because this is not what we’re hearing from our Western media, from our governments, despite many attempts of foreign doctors who’ve been there to speak out and tell them.
“Totally Uncivilized, Evil Behavior”
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, some of the accounts are so shocking— that the military just rolls into a hospital, abducts senior physicians, and then rapes them in prison with no charges— it’s kind of hard to believe that could be true, given that Israel is regarded by, I think, most people in the United States as a civilized country. Maybe you disagree with their influence over our politics, but it’s Israel. It’s not that different from us. You’re describing totally uncivilized, evil behavior. Organized behavior.
Entering Gaza After October 7th
DR. NICK MAYNARD: I’m describing what I have either seen or what close friends have told me, and the volume of accounts that I have read, heard are overwhelming. And to me, the amount of volume of reports coming out tells me very clearly this is happening.
TUCKER CARLSON: So after October 7th, October 7th happens, were you in the UK when that happened?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: I was in the UK, yeah.
TUCKER CARLSON: Given how familiar you are with Gaza and the crossings from Gaza into Israel, were you surprised that Hamas or militants could cross the border in those numbers without pushback from the Israeli military?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: I think we’re all surprised, and I think there’s a huge amount we don’t know about the events of that day. My concentration at the time was within 12 hours of that, I was being contacted by my friends and colleagues out there, who, in the very, very early days, were predicting there was going to be the most almighty backlash, and that they were already, on the day afterwards, begging those of us who could to go out there and help them.
TUCKER CARLSON: So, they knew what was coming.
DR. NICK MAYNARD: So I think by the next day, by October 8th, they knew what was coming. And we were talking to them, and people were trying to get in there right from the word go to go and help.
TUCKER CARLSON: When did you get back into Gaza after that?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: So my first trip was, we went in on Boxing Day. So December 26th, we were meant to go on Christmas Day and we got delayed by the Egyptian military, in fact, in the Sinai. So we went into Gaza on December 26th and it was the first significant emergency medical teams that went in there.
TUCKER CARLSON: What did you find when you got there?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: I remember approaching it from this— we’d had a sort of very long crossing the northern Sinai, going through all the Egyptian military checkpoints. It was a— I always remember there was a beautiful day, beautifully sunny, no clouds in the sky. And then you could see as we approached Rafah from Egypt, you could see this low-lying cloud over the whole of southern Gaza, which of course was smoke from the bombs. And you could smell it from about 2 or 3 miles away. You could smell the burning and it was awful. It was awful.
So we got into Rafah, we got through the sort of Egyptian checkpoints. Then the Gazan checkpoints. And we had to drive through Rafah to get to the house we were— the safe house we were living in. And this was, you know, 2, 2 and a half months into it, by which time a lot of people had been displaced from northern Gaza and Gaza City. The migration of displaced refugees from the north was like something I’ve never seen before.
As we were driving through Rafah and then up the coast road towards Middle Gaza, where the hospital we were going to be working in, Deir al-Balah, it was— it’s impossible to put words to it. The thousands of people walking down, most of them walking, some of them in horse and carts, some of them in vehicles, who’d been displaced and were moving down south to get away from all the trauma. So that to me was a sight I will never forget, seeing these people.
And then of course, at that time, Al-Mawasi, which will be an area you’re familiar with. It’s what the Israelis paradoxically were calling the safe area that everyone was being evacuated to.
TUCKER CARLSON: Safe area. Yeah, I remember.
The Reality on the Ground
DR. NICK MAYNARD: You remember that. Well, of course, it’s not remotely safe. At that time, there were no tents up there at all. It was people walking there. The next time I went back a few months later, of course, that had been covered in tents. I say tents, but they’re not really tents. They’re sort of makeshift shelters.
The hundreds of thousands had been moved down south was just— it was awful to see because their homes had been destroyed. Their homes had been destroyed. And friends of mine had been displaced 6, 7, 8, 9 times.
That very first trip, I remember I’d been in the hospital, in Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah, for about 4 or 5 days. I have many friends out there, one particularly close family whose daughter left Gaza about 8 years previously. She got a scholarship to get out. She stayed in the UK. She’s a doctor there. She became a member of our family. So I used to see her family every time I go to Gaza.
They came to visit me at the hospital, Al-Aqsa, just a week after I’d arrived. And they were distraught. I mean, they’d been displaced 6 times at that point. They were living with no running water, no electricity. They had all written on their legs in ink their names and their dates of birth. This is what they all did because they all expected to be killed, and they wanted their bodies to be recognized. They want to be identified. These are close friends of mine.
I thought I’d be prepared because I had been on the phone to my Gazan friends and colleagues almost daily since October 7th. We have a strong network in Oxford in particular of people who’ve been out there. So we were all interacting with all our different contacts. We were meeting regularly on a weekly basis to see what we could do. And I thought I’d be prepared, but nothing could have prepared me for what I saw there.
TUCKER CARLSON: And you’re a surgeon, so it’s not like you’re fainting at the sight of blood.
Inside Al-Aqsa Hospital
DR. NICK MAYNARD: No. I’ve described to you the sort of non-medical things so far, but of course you get into the hospital, and it was— Al-Aqsa Hospital, which is where I was first based, is a small hospital. It’s not a trauma hospital, it’s a very small hospital. It has a bed capacity of 200 normally. There was something like 800 patients there. The grounds of the hospital, the corridors, the waiting areas were covered in patients and their relatives. You could hardly move. I mean, literally every time you walked into the hospital, you were treading over people who were lying there or sitting there.
The trauma we saw at that time in December 2023, the numbers of aerial bombardments was just non-stop. So we had mass casualty after mass casualty. It was really quite remarkable, the awful trauma you were seeing. And this hospital, the quality of the surgical care, the medical care, is remarkable, but there’s only so much you can do with limited resources. So the capacity of the hospital was being repeatedly overwhelmed.
TUCKER CARLSON: Were you performing surgeries?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Yeah, I was. I spent the whole time operating on major explosive injuries, bomb injuries. I do abdominal and thoracic surgery back home in Oxford, so I was operating on the abdomen and the chest all the time. And these were injuries at that time from explosive injuries and from what are called the fragmentation missiles that were being used there. These are the bombs which contain many thousands of very, very small metal pieces which then act as thousands of pieces of shrapnel which tear through the human bodies. These are bombs which are designed to cause the maximum amount of tissue destruction, and they did indeed do that.
So we saw multiple civilians, children— 70% of the people I treated in that first trip were women and children being destroyed by these bombs. I mean, I can talk about the little brother and sister, Ala and Aya, a 6 and an 8-year-old brother and sister who were the sole remaining members of their family. Their parents were killed by the bomb.
TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, come on.
DR. NICK MAYNARD: I can see them in front of me as I’m talking to you about them. I can remember their injuries. We were treating them. These were days when we had completely run out of all pain relief. So we had no painkillers to give them.
TUCKER CARLSON: Before surgery?
Operating Without Pain Relief
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Before surgery. So in the ER, for example, you resuscitate them. Little Aya, an 8-year-old girl, had such a badly broken leg that it had cut off the blood supply to her foot. So that leg had to be straightened in order to stop the foot dying, and that had to be done without any pain relief. And I’m telling you this, I can hear her screams as that was done. So we saw awful things.
A group of us who’ve been out there did a survey of about 100 foreign healthcare workers who’ve worked in the acute situations there. And we had this published in the British Medical Journal at the end of last year, where we described the pattern of injuries. And this has been widely disseminated in the medical world now because of the conclusions we drew.
We described huge and terrible shrapnel injuries, gunshot wounds, burn injuries. But what we’ve described as multiple examples of high-energy weapons being used in civilian populations, and the pattern of injuries that we described is a pattern that’s only previously been described in true combat situations, i.e., when soldiers fight soldiers. The pattern of injuries we described using these high-energy weapons, the missiles, has never been described in civilian populations before in such high numbers, which again supports the contention that many of us have spoken about, saying that this is evidence of indiscriminate, deliberate, whatever, but mass targeting of civilian populations.
TUCKER CARLSON: And when civilians are killed, by definition, it’s murder because they’re not part of it. They committed no crime. What are injuries like from high-explosive missiles, bombs?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: So we don’t see those who are within a few hundred meters because they’re killed outright. If they’re very close, they get killed by the shockwave. If they’re within a few hundred meters, they get destroyed by the shrapnel. So we see people who are several hundred meters away, but they come in—
TUCKER CARLSON: Several hundred meters away?
The Nature of the Wounds
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Yeah. They come in with the most appalling injuries. You don’t see the pieces of shrapnel often. They’re 1 or 2 millimeters. You don’t see them. You don’t find the majority of them, but you see these multiple entry points throughout the chest, throughout the abdomen, causing the most appalling damage.
I learned a lot from the Gazan surgeons. I mean, I work in Oxford. We don’t see trauma like that. We don’t see trauma like that anywhere in the world, really. Certainly not in the United Kingdom. So they had been dealing with this day in, day out. It was a very steep learning curve for me and for most of us coming from the UK. Dealing with this sort of shrapnel damage, which we don’t normally see, just shredding their way through the lungs, through the diaphragm, through the liver. Awful liver injuries, pancreas, bowel injuries. And of course, sometimes you see multiple injuries throughout the abdomen, so you have to laboriously search out all the different holes and different things. So terrible injuries. And of course, they’re life-threatening in their own right.
But the very strong narrative from my most recent trip, although we called this out on earlier trips, was the malnutrition we saw. So, the starvation, these patients coming in with these terrible injuries, but also profoundly malnourished, and their inability to heal from injuries from the surgery. So, the mortality rate from these injuries was far, far higher than they should have been.
Starvation in Gaza
TUCKER CARLSON: I’m confused because we had a guy, an American called Johnny Moore, who’s some sort of self-described Christian minister who ran the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, and we were assured directly by him that there’s no starvation in Gaza because they were bringing in more than enough food aid. That’s not true?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Most certainly not true. Whether that’s a deliberate lie or misinformation, I can categorically say there is no truth in that statement whatsoever. I spoke out about this publicly back in January 2024, when that was 3 months into it— we were beginning to see the signs of malnutrition. I was there again 6 months later. It was much, much worse. I was there again the following year. And the malnutrition— I can reel off names of children who I operated on who died because they were malnourished. I mean, they’re imprinted on my mind.
You know, little Habiba, a beautiful 11-year-old girl who came in. She wasn’t malnourished when she came in, but she had a severe explosive injury. Her lower esophagus was shattered. That’s what I do in Oxford. I operate on the esophagus day in, day out. I spent the whole of one night operating, reconstructing her esophagus successfully. But because her esophagus was so damaged, she couldn’t eat or drink. She was on a ventilator. We had to tube feed her. We had no nutrition to give her. She died after 4 weeks. Her repairs intact, she died because she had no nutrition.
TUCKER CARLSON: Because the hospital had nothing to give her.
Starvation, Blockades, and the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation
DR. NICK MAYNARD: We had no nutrition to give her. We had no nutrition to give any patients at all, Tucker. No nutrition.
TUCKER CARLSON: Where was the rest of the world?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Well, I mean, this is something we’ve called out repeatedly, very publicly, something I’ve told my government about, that there is a total blockade. At that time, a total blockade which lasted about 5 or 6 months of any aid going into Gaza. From March 18th, 2025, when the Israelis broke that ceasefire, I was there in June, July. There was a complete blockade, no food going in.
I saw members, friends of mine, surgeons I’d known for years. One guy, I didn’t recognize him because he lost 40 kilograms in weight. I lost 8 kilograms in a month there because we had very little food to eat. So the malnutrition, the starvation was appalling. And those commentators who claim there was enough food going in are being profoundly dishonest in saying that.
TUCKER CARLSON: But I mean, what was the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation doing then? Well, they were going on television bragging about how Johnny Moore was telling everybody that they were saving the people of Gaza.
DR. NICK MAYNARD: They weren’t at all. So prior to that, UNRWA was distributing food. They were of course stopped by the Israelis. They were distributing food through over 400 food distribution points and within the limitations of what food was getting into Gaza, they were distributing it as well as they could. They were stopped completely.
They were replaced by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which had 4 food distribution points. Now, I didn’t go to them because I wasn’t able to, because I was in the hospitals. It was too dangerous to leave the hospitals. I was in Nasser Hospital, where at one point the Israeli military were 200 meters away. We couldn’t go out at all. The only safe place we could, or the least dangerous place, was to stay in the hospital.
But what I did see were the victims who had been shot at those Gaza Humanitarian Foundation food distribution sites.
TUCKER CARLSON: You personally saw them?
Shooting at Food Distribution Sites
DR. NICK MAYNARD: I operated on many of them. And I also had Gazan colleagues, Gazan healthcare workers who used to go out to the food distribution points, the GHF sites, to get food. And these were all describing these food distribution sites as death traps.
The first inkling I had that something horrible was going on there was, I think, on something like my fourth day there, my last trip. I was called to the operating theatre by one of my Gazan surgical colleagues who had a 12-year-old boy on the operating table. And he’d been shot. It had gone through his aorta. He was dying. He was bleeding. They couldn’t stop the bleeding. So they asked for my help. I went in there. I couldn’t stop it either. By which time his clotting had all gone wrong. This happens in severe injuries. So he was bleeding out from everywhere and he died on the operating table under our hands.
TUCKER CARLSON: Awful. I mean, you can imagine. 12 years old.
DR. NICK MAYNARD: 12 years old. And his family told us, who’d come with him, that these are all starving, they’re all very weak. So the young teenage boys are the ones who are sent out because they’re the strongest to get the food. And he’d been shot by an Israeli soldier there.
TUCKER CARLSON: Why?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: They’d witnessed this. Well, I can’t speculate any better than anyone else as to why this is happening. What I can do is I can document what I saw and I can document what I heard. And it was a similar story from all the victims’ families, from those that survived, from the victims themselves, from Gazan healthcare workers who went to these food sites in order to get food for their families. They all described the same things, how these young teenage boys were being shot by Israeli soldiers.
So that 12-year-old was shot, and then I started hearing from many others. A friend of mine who worked in the emergency room at Nasser Hospital, one of the people I was telling you about earlier who had the previous year been incarcerated in an Israeli prison for 60 days and being tortured daily, he’d recovered. He was now working again. He told me how they had noticed in the ER how there were different body parts being targeted on different days at the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation food distribution point.
So one day, and other emergency room doctors and nurses I knew corroborated this, 19 young teenage boys had all come in in one day, all of whom had been shot in the head and neck. Nowhere else, just the head and neck. Another day they came in predominantly with chest injuries. Another day they came in predominantly with abdominal gunshot wounds. And we noticed this.
I started speaking to my fellow surgeons in the operating theaters, and we all noticed this pattern as well. On one day, the Saturday before I left Nasser Hospital to come home to England, 4 young teenage boys were brought in, all of whom had been shot in the testicles. Just the testicles, nowhere else. And the pattern of injuries that we all witnessed was so striking that it was clearly beyond coincidental. And it seemed to us like there was a game of target practice.
TUCKER CARLSON: And these were all children who’d been shot, Palestinians who’d been shot at Gaza Humanitarian Foundation food distribution sites.
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Absolutely. And I operated on a lot of them. I operated on a lot of them with abdominals.
TUCKER CARLSON: How can you?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Okay.
The Mechanics of the Food Distribution Sites
TUCKER CARLSON: So if you’re, let’s say you have the ministry to distribute food to the starving, not to Hamas militants, but just to families, children, women, the elderly, and people start getting shot at your distribution sites. Don’t you do something about that? How could the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation day after day allow starving people to be shot at their distribution sites? Your guess is as good as mine, but just try to put yourself in their position. Wouldn’t you say, “Whoa, wait a second, we can’t have this?” Wouldn’t you say that?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Yes, I would. The description I got from many of my colleagues who went to them was that the food would all be laid out in the compound, and the gate would be locked, and they’d wait, and there’d be enough food. And again, I heard this description from many of my friends and colleagues who used to — these are people who’d been working intense shifts in the hospital for 24 hours. Then before they went home, they had to go and get food for their starving family.
So there’d be this food in a compound, and there’d be enough food for, say, 200 people in this compound. There’d be a narrow gate locked with everyone crowding outside. They would wait until there were 4, 5, 600 people queuing up outside, i.e., far more people than there was food allocated for. And then they’d open this narrow gate to get in, and there’d be utter chaos and fighting to try and get that food. And that was when they were being picked out, apparently, with —
TUCKER CARLSON: Shot in the head.
DR. NICK MAYNARD: They were being shot trying to get in, and shot in the pen by surrounding soldiers.
TUCKER CARLSON: Unarmed people.
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Unarmed people. Again, I stress, this is what’s been described to me.
Johnny Moore, Liberty University, and War Crimes
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, and not just by you. I mean, we interviewed Tony Aguilar, who was one of the American contractors hired to provide security for these sites, who described the same thing. And he watched his life overturned as he was slandered by Netanyahu’s many defenders in our media, paid liars by Johnny Moore, who ran it, who’s now affiliated with Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia.
And I do hope that the people who run Liberty will sit Mr. Moore down and ask him to respond to what you’ve just said, because you’re describing a war crime. One of the most immoral, disgusting scenes I can imagine, which he oversaw. And so you hate to think that someone like that could be rewarded by Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, after participating in that.
So I just want this on the record, that it probably matters. No one will pay any attention because no one has so far, but that’s really upsetting. So the children, the boys shot in the genitals — I see, even to ask, but is that something that can be fixed?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Yeah, I mean, they weren’t my patients because I’m not a urologist, but I remember when they came in, because I was in the operating theater complex at Nasser operating on people with gunshot wounds to the abdomen. And my close friends who are urologists had this succession of boys being brought in who they were operating on. So I wasn’t involved in their care. I didn’t follow them up afterwards, but I can verify they were shot exclusively in the testicles.
TUCKER CARLSON: Ah, come on.
Quadcopter Drones and Targeted Attacks
DR. NICK MAYNARD: And there were — I remember that same day, on many of the days we got young boys being brought in from the GHF sites. There was one of the GHF sites was in Al-Mawasi. And there were a lot of tents down there as well. We saw a lot of injuries from quadcopter drones. These remotely controlled fixed-wing drones which hover. They have guns on them. They have cameras on them and they’re flown all over the place in Gaza.
We saw many people shot by them. They were flown into hospitals. One of my friends was shot in the chest in the operating theaters at Nasser. Not when I was there, it was before I was there. A quadcopter was remotely controlled, presumably by someone in Tel Aviv or somewhere, flown into the hospital, shot him in the chest when he was in the operating theater.
TUCKER CARLSON: He’s in the operating room?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: He’s in the operating room early in the morning preparing the operating theater for an imminent operation, when this quadcopter shoots him in the chest. He survived. I was with him a few weeks later than that.
TUCKER CARLSON: Indoors?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Indoors, indoors. I also saw victims, young women who had been shot whilst in their tents in Al-Mawasi, quadcopters hovering over the tents spraying bullets indiscriminately onto the tents. So I had one woman who was 3 months pregnant, who came in with a gunshot wound. Rabdan and I operated on her — we saved her life. The baby survived as well, but the bullet had missed her pregnant uterus by about 2 or 3 centimeters. So we saw examples like that of these quadcopters spraying bullets onto all the inhabitants of these tents.
TUCKER CARLSON: But I mean, the quadcopters are controlled by remote by someone who can see what they’re shooting at.
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Yes, I mean, there’s a lot of speculation that a lot of them are being driven remotely using artificial intelligence.
TUCKER CARLSON: That’s not speculation.
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Yeah, to help the targeting. But absolutely, they were being controlled somehow and going into hospitals, spraying the tents in Al-Mawasi. We saw many examples of that. I saw them on my first trip in December 2023. We saw in Al-Aqsa, we had victims coming in from quadcopter shooting.
TUCKER CARLSON: What did you think of all of this?
The Psychological Toll
DR. NICK MAYNARD: I was really skeptical when I was told on that first trip that these were quadcopters. I didn’t see any quadcopters. You hear the drones the whole time. I could not believe what I was hearing. I didn’t believe a lot of it early on, to be honest with you, Tucker. I was naive. I assumed this was just — I wondered if it was propaganda. But I saw so much on all these trips. I saw so much clear evidence of children and women being targeted that I believe all of it.
TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, much more than the average person, you spent your life around death and suffering and human drama. I mean, you’re a cancer surgeon, so presumably you’ve got a higher tolerance for this than most people. I mean, obviously you do. But what effect did it have on you seeing this?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: You do get — you’re absolutely right. And I think working with cancer, I’ve had patients die of their disease for decades.
TUCKER CARLSON: Of course.
The Emotional Toll and Media Suppression
DR. NICK MAYNARD: I’ve always been a doctor who valued intensely the relationship I have with my patients. And there is— you always have an emotional involvement. You learn to control that. But of course you get emotionally involved with your patients because you care about them deeply. So yes, I am conditioned to deal with that. And I think doctors, nurses, healthcare workers are conditioned to deal with these things.
When we’re operating on these appalling situations, these children, when you have children dying under your hands on the operating table, you deal with it there and then you get on with it. But the aftermath later that night, and when you get back to England, is awful. And I learned, we all learned a lot how to deal with the emotional turmoil we all experienced. And we shared a lot. We talked a lot late at night on the fourth floor of Nasser Hospital.
Incidentally, the most recent big massive bombing of the Israeli military on Nasser Hospital was on the 4th floor, which is— they claimed, coming back to one of your earlier questions— they claimed that was where Hamas militants were masquerading as journalists, in fact. And it was not a clinical area. In fact, the 4th floor is where we were living. It’s where the intensive care unit was. It’s where the operating theater complex was. It was yet another clinical area being targeted by the Israeli military.
But coming back to what you asked me about, we would, at the end of the day, whether it was at 10 o’clock, midnight, 2 in the morning, we would talk and share the awful things we’d seen. And that was very therapeutic. It was really cathartic talking to each other and sharing.
TUCKER CARLSON: Were these mostly Western doctors?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: No, no. There were a few Western doctors, but a lot of Gazan doctors as well. So we’d all congregate, and I was meeting up with people, some people I’d known for years. But it was a mixture of Gazan and Western doctors all just sharing these appalling things. And that was, to an extent, cathartic. It was very therapeutic, but it lingers with you.
And I want everyone to realize, we’re there for 2, 3, 4 weeks at a time. Our Gazan colleagues are there— they’ve been seeing this day in, day out for 2 and a half years. So whatever we have witnessed and seen, they’ve seen far more worse. And the psychological trauma, the mental health damage, is incalculable amongst all the Gazan people.
Media Suppression and Political Cowardice
TUCKER CARLSON: But you get back to the UK and almost— not entirely, but almost— your entire media is conspiring to hide the truth of what’s happening in Gaza and attacking anyone who calls attention to it. How do you feel about that?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Profound anger. You have a real, very complex set of emotions when you leave Gaza having had a trip like this. You feel guilty that you’re getting out and they can’t get out. You feel immense sadness that you’re leaving friends who you know may be killed. All my friends out there tell me, and they’ve said this repeatedly, they expect to be killed out there. You’re leaving patients who probably won’t survive.
But you feel this incredible anger towards your government, towards our government, our media. The media is not particularly interested in listening to what we say now, but they were to a degree then, particularly once we’ve just come out. So I did a lot of media stuff, and there were individual journalists— some wonderful journalists I’ve met and shared my experience with— who’ve been desperately trying to get their media outlets to show this. But the BBC, I think as a corporation, has behaved appallingly over the last—
TUCKER CARLSON: I think that’s fair to say, yes.
DR. NICK MAYNARD: But that doesn’t hide that there have been some wonderful BBC journalists who I know who’ve been desperately trying to get this out and have been thwarted. Some of them have ended up resigning because they’ve been so appalled. But there are many really worthy, passionate journalists who want to get the information out there, but they’re being controlled and not being allowed to by their senior editorial boards. So it’s been hugely frustrating. Hugely frustrating.
TUCKER CARLSON: There are also people who’ve defended it flat out. Certainly here in the United States, there are many people in our media who basically just attack anyone who points out what’s happening and slander them as haters and Nazis. What do you think of that?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: I think it’s profoundly dishonest. I think a lot about why people are denying this and why they’re not allowing it to get out. I think there’s certainly in my country a lot of cowardice— a huge amount of cowardice— both in the media. I talk a lot about how our institutions in the UK have failed Gaza: our academic institutions, our medical institutions, our associations, our royal colleges. They’ve all been silent. And our media clearly as well.
So I think at one level, there’s a lot of cowardice there. Petrified they’re going to be accused of being antisemitic. And the appalling crime of antisemitism has been terribly weaponized as a result of what’s going on. And people are petrified that if they do come out and say these things, they will be accused publicly of being antisemitic. And of course, that label lasts, doesn’t it?
TUCKER CARLSON: You can’t have a job.
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Yeah, exactly. So it’s very difficult for them, I think. But I think it’s not— there are many examples and it’s much more malign than that. I think there are clear agendas to try and shut this all up so that the truth doesn’t get out. And it’s public knowledge that many of our senior politicians— a lot of their campaigns have been funded by various lobbies with money from Israel.
TUCKER CARLSON: I think all of your politicians.
DR. NICK MAYNARD: All of our— I mean, I think it’s out there in public knowledge. They’ve all— I think you can look at the individual, every single one of them has been.
TUCKER CARLSON: So in all three major parties?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Yes, well, I suppose it depends who the major parties are, but yeah, in Reform, Labour.
TUCKER CARLSON: I’m counting Reform as a major party now.
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Absolutely, you’re absolutely right. They have been, and that’s all public knowledge. And there’s a wonderful— I don’t know if you’ve read the book called Complicit by Peter Oborne. He’s a well-known British journalist who’s written a book— I’d really urge everyone to read it. It’s about the way that the UK media and the government has been complicit in this genocide in Gaza. And it lays bare all these things about how compromised our politicians are, how compromised our institutions are, how compromised our media is.
Jeremy Corbyn and the Weaponization of Antisemitism
TUCKER CARLSON: I’ll never forget, maybe 10 years ago, you had this head of the Labour Party who was an old leftist, all kind of pro-Soviet leftist. I didn’t have much in common with him. I never really thought about him. But the one issue on which he was kind of different from the people who paid for the party was on Israel. He was skeptical of British support for the state of Israel. And I’ve never seen a man slandered like he was slandered.
Now again, it’s not my role to defend him. I’m not British and I’m not an old leftist, but that guy was basically driven out of public life. And after that happened, the Labour Party just kind of swung into alignment with the Conservatives and with Reform. And basically the entire British political establishment is on the same page: don’t talk about Gaza, Israel’s our closest ally, shut up, Nazi. Am I imagining this?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: No, you’re portraying it exactly as it was. And I’m not a politician. I’ve got no political agenda. My role, I believe, is to bear witness to what I’ve seen out there. But it seems very, very clear to me that the weaponization of antisemitism is rife through our society. And it’s being used to shut people up. And I’ve got to know Jeremy Corbyn quite well in the last 2 or 3 years. I’ve shared platforms with him.
TUCKER CARLSON: I was referring to Jeremy Corbyn. Yeah.
DR. NICK MAYNARD: And having spoken with him, I don’t believe there’s an antisemitic cell in his body. I think he is passionately supportive of the Palestinians, and that is what his motivation has been. He tried to pass a bill through Parliament to get a tribunal to investigate what’s been going on. It was clearly turned down. He ran his own independent tribunal to which I contributed my evidence as well. And there was evidence from a whole host of people. It’s a publication worth looking at. And it speaks volumes about the people who have witnessed what’s going on out in Gaza and are desperate to get the truth out there— what’s really going on— and describing how the attempts to shut them down have been unacceptable.
Accountability and the Historical Record
TUCKER CARLSON: I think the only reason I bring this up— British politics is obviously not my world at all, I’m definitely nonpartisan when it comes to British politics— but I think at some point when it becomes clear what happened, that there was the largest ethnic cleansing attempt since the Second World War, since the Nazis, right on the edge of Europe, right across the Mediterranean from Europe, like right there, with money and support from the United States and from Britain— the question is going to arise: how did this happen? Where were the people who were supposed to say something about it? How were they able to do this in sight of the world and the world did nothing? And I think these are part of the answer.
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Yeah, I mean, it is unfathomable how the world has allowed this to happen. But the evidence is— I mean, I’ve been to the International Criminal Court on several occasions to give my evidence, and the evidence they have is a vast amount of evidence now.
TUCKER CARLSON: Really?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: A huge amount of evidence, because they’ve interviewed many, many people like me who’ve been out there. I can speak from my own experience of what I’ve shown to senior politicians, what I’ve shown to the BBC. I spoke to BBC journalists about my experience with those young teenage boys. I gave them all the evidence I’ve just shared with you, and the individual journalists were desperate to get it out there— desperate— but they were not allowed to.
I wasn’t party to the editorial discussions, but they were clearly being held back by their seniors and it never got out there. I’ve spoken about it on camera, so they never aired it. I know I’ve spoken about it on camera. That evidence I gave was all independent, was separate, non-public evidence. But they were wanting to develop that into a detailed story, which they never did. So I’ve only ever shared that on brief interviews on media in the UK.
That is remarkable that they wouldn’t show it. But there are many examples like that. You just have to hear every single BBC reference to Gaza, to the death, to the figures of death. They’ll always talk about the “Hamas-led Ministry of Health.” That is clearly a senior policy— whenever you mention the Gazan Ministry of Health, you have to say the “Hamas-led Gazan Ministry of Health.”
TUCKER CARLSON: In order to discredit their findings.
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Precisely.
TUCKER CARLSON: I can see why you’re a threat to that propaganda operation, because you’re not working for Hamas, you’re working for Oxford. So you have more credibility. So I can see why they wouldn’t want to air it.
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Yeah. So the response is either not to show what we’ve said, or we get accused— not by the BBC, but other agencies— of lying.
TUCKER CARLSON: Have you been accused of lying?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Multiple times, yeah.
TUCKER CARLSON: What would your motive be for lying?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Well, no motive at all. And I’m at pains to point out repeatedly that I’m a humanitarian. I’m not a politician. I am a humanitarian. And I am reporting what I’ve seen with my own eyes. I’ve borne witness to what I believe to be war crimes almost on a daily basis. The clearest evidence I can imagine, in the absence of being an international lawyer, of genocide being carried out, ethnic cleansing being carried out.
It seems to me— I’m astonished that anyone can look at the evidence and not see what is going on there. And the evidence is so clear that I think those that refuse to acknowledge it have malign intentions in suppressing that.
The BBC’s False Balance and Propaganda
TUCKER CARLSON: And it’s hard not to see design in all of this. I mean, the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which now has the force of law in a lot of the world— It is a crime to say certain things thanks to this definition. And in that definition, one of the examples given is any comparison between the actions of the Israeli government and the German Nazi regime of the 1930s and ’40s. It kind of seems like, because that’s the obvious comparison, of course it’s the obvious comparison. It kind of seems like that was a preemptive attempt to keep people from noticing the obvious.
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Yeah, I mean, I see the great value of my testimony describing what I’m seeing rather than trying to make comparisons.
TUCKER CARLSON: Right. No, that’s fair.
DR. NICK MAYNARD: And I think that, and I’ve seen many other healthcare workers being there do this with all the best of intentions, but it dilutes the strong message I can give, and I don’t want to distract from that. So I will— I think that the evidence I can describe in my own eyewitness testimony is so powerful by itself that I’ll stick to that side.
TUCKER CARLSON: I think that’s very wise and more powerful. I agree with you. Do you think what’s happening in Gaza is well known within Israel?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: I have no idea. I mean, it seems very difficult to believe they don’t know what’s going on, but I guess we’ve witnessed repeatedly the propaganda coming from Israeli spokesmen who speak to our media. I can only imagine that it’s much more extensive than that, what’s going on internally. So I think that’s right.
I remember, about a year ago, just as an example of the appalling propaganda, the BBC talks repeatedly about how they have to have a balanced approach to this. And it’s a false balance. We all know it’s a false balance.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.
DR. NICK MAYNARD: So they will give X amount of minutes to someone speaking up for what’s going on in Gaza, and they’ll give the same amount of time to an Israeli spokesman. And about a year ago, they interviewed my closest friend in Gaza, who I’ve known for many, many, many years, an inspirational doctor.
And by the way, we talk about all the horrors, the atrocities, the sheer evil that I’ve seen with my own eyes. I’ve also seen the very, very best of humanity, some of the most inspirational heroes, wonderful people. One of them is this very old friend of mine who I’ve known since 2010, since my first trip.
He was interviewed. He’s a doctor in Gaza. He was interviewed by the BBC, the Radio 4 Today program, which is our sort of flagship news program in the morning. And they gave him 6, 7 minutes, and he interviewed brilliantly. And then immediately after that, they interviewed one of the Israeli spokesmen called David Mentzer, who used to work in— I think he headed up UK Labour Friends of Israel or something.
But anyway, he was interviewed and he started off by saying, “Well, it’s important your listeners understand that we know that man who you just interviewed is not a proper doctor. We know he is a senior commander in the Hamas military and that you cannot accept anything of what he said for the truth.”
Now, I’m not talking about my opinion here. I’m talking about what are clear facts. I know this man. I’ve known him for 16 years. He’s an inspirational doctor. What this man David Mentzer was saying were clear lies and deliberate lies.
So I contacted the BBC through some of my contacts and got through to the editorial board at the table and said, “Listen, you’ve knowingly allowed this man to speak lies. These are not different opinions. These are out-and-out lies. You need to give me the right to reply, to speak up for this man who’s been maligned on this.”
And they debated it, but they didn’t let me have any right of reply. And their argument was, “We feel they’ve had a balance. They’ve both had 7 minutes and that was a balance.” And of course, that’s their stock answer, which is a false balance. It’s not giving equal exposure.
Politicians and Public Pressure in the UK
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s got to be so frustrating to live in a country like that.
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Appalling.
TUCKER CARLSON: Are there any politicians in the UK that you think are open to doing something about this?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Most certainly. I’ve met many. And again, it’s like the journalists. I’ve met many great journalists who want to. I’ve met many backbench MPs who were appalled by this. The Green Party— Zach— I’ve not met Zach Polanski, but he’s spoken out at length. I’ve spoken at length to Jeremy Corbyn, Zahra Sultana, many backbench MPs in the Labour Party. The SNP party in Scotland has been brilliant in speaking up. The Lib Dems have had people. There have even been one or two Tory backbenchers who’ve been very, very outspoken and very supportive.
So there are many people there and they are all waking up. They have all woken up. We’ve had some incredible marches in the UK. You’ll have seen pictures of them, getting on for a million people sometimes marching in London in support of Gaza. They’re not hate marches as we’re being told by Reform and the Conservatives and our right-wing media. These are— I’ve been on many of them with my wife and my daughter, who are avid marchers. They’re peace marches. They’re supporting the Gazan people who are being ethnically cleansed, who are undergoing a genocide.
But that has had an impact. There is a huge pressure being exerted by the people who’ve woken up to what’s going on, by going to their MPs, and they are having an impact. I mean, it’s nothing like enough. And of course it’s far too late. But there are a lot of backbench MPs who I think are appalled.
Conservative Media’s Support for Israel
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s interesting, though, you say it’s the right-wing media in the UK that’s supportive of Netanyahu’s ethnic cleansing in Gaza. In the United States, it’s kind of the opposite. It’s a lot of former Trump voters who are maddest about what’s happening in Gaza. I mean, there’s no reason any nationalist should support what’s happening in Gaza. How is that good for the UK? How is that good for the United States? Why do you think conservative media and politicians in the UK have been roped into supporting something that’s terrible for the UK?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: I mean, I don’t know the answer to that. I guess we’d include— I mean, I think our mainstream parties are all like that now. And I think the media supporting the mainstream parties— there are very few media outlets in the UK which are supportive of what’s going on in Gaza. So it’s perhaps not just the right wing, but I think they are the most vocal about this. I don’t know. I mean, I think—
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s so disappointing.
DR. NICK MAYNARD: It is. I think the book I mentioned, Complicit by Peter Oborne, goes into this in a lot of detail and it’s some fascinating insights. But it does seem to be there’s a very, very vocal sort of group of commentators on the right who speak out a lot in support of Israel and are very successful in calling out those who are speaking against it.
Banned from Entering Gaza
TUCKER CARLSON: Ah, that’s so depressing. How are you treated by the Israeli government when you transit through Israel? Can you go there now?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: I’ve not been able to get in the last few months. I’m trying to go. I’m hoping to go in August, but you never know. In the last few months, they’ve stopped all people. The majority of people like me who have spoken out have been stopped from going in. They’ve now banned more than 36 NGOs from taking medics into Gaza. MSF has been banned from going in. Other very well-known humanitarian organizations have been banned completely.
So about a year ago, the Israelis announced they were introducing a new registration process for agencies that wanted to take in doctors to work there. Which of course is against international law because we don’t have to be registered. We go in to work in the occupied Palestinian territories and our authority is given to us by the Palestinian Authority. But nevertheless, you have to go through the Israeli borders.
And their registration process, the document details exclusion criteria as to what would prevent us being registered. And one of them is that if the organization itself, or any member of the organization, or any volunteer with the organization has at any time in the last 7 years criticized the state of Israel, that organization will be banned from working in Gaza or the West Bank. Now, that will exclude a significant majority of the most prominent humanitarian organizations.
TUCKER CARLSON: You probably wouldn’t be there in the first place if you supported what Israel was doing, if you were for ethnic cleansing.
DR. NICK MAYNARD: So it’s made it very, very difficult for humanitarian teams to get in there.
Gaza’s Death Toll and Remaining Hospital
TUCKER CARLSON: So how do hospitals in— the one remaining hospital in Gaza, which, by the way, I should have asked at the outset, what do you think the population of Gaza is right now?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: So it’s a good question. The official figures from the Ministry of Health, recognized by the United Nations and indeed recognized by the Israeli military now, is about 76,000 killed by trauma alone. The Lancet medical journal, which has published brilliantly— 76,000 just from trauma. The Lancet medical journal estimates— because there are many thousands of people buried under the rubble, including friends of mine— so they estimate with great authority, I think, that that has underestimated it by about 50%. So there are probably 100,000 killed directly by trauma, but that excludes the excess deaths.
We’ll remember that term from the COVID pandemic, those people dying of non-COVID-related causes like cancer or kidney disease.
TUCKER CARLSON: Suicide.
DR. NICK MAYNARD: In Gaza.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
DR. NICK MAYNARD: There has been no cancer really being treated for 2 and a half years. No kidney disease. Many of the dialysis machines in Shifa Hospital were destroyed by the Israeli army when they went in there. So there are many other— there are 350,000 people in Gaza who have chronic illnesses that require regular medical treatment, which aren’t being treated. So there are many infectious diseases, malnutrition we’ve talked about. So there are many, many people dying of excess deaths.
Now, The Lancet estimated 18 months ago that that figure was probably about 180,000 on top of the trauma deaths. There are other estimates, and of course these are difficult to be overly accurate, but there are some estimates that it’s at least several hundred thousand. I heard one estimate saying it was over half a million excess deaths.
Now, even if you just take the first perhaps conservative Lancet figure of 186,000, when you include the trauma deaths, that’s over a quarter of a million. That is well over 10% of the population of Gaza. And the more extreme examples are more than 20% of the population of Gaza. So the population of Gaza on October 6th, 2023 was about 2.2 million. It’s certainly under 2 million now. I mean, it’s shocking.
TUCKER CARLSON: And for that, whatever that number is, but over a million people, there’s one major hospital. That’s it.
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Yeah, I mean, Nasser Hospital is the only really major hospital still functioning. But it is not functioning fully. When I was there, we ran out of stuff the whole time. I talked about often having no painkillers to give patients.
We had one 2-week period when we had no sterile drapes to use in the operating theater. So we use sterile drapes to create a sterile operating field so you can operate, reduce the risk of infections. We had one 2-week period when we had no sterile drapes, so we had to sort of make our own out of gowns, and we couldn’t create proper sterile fields.
We had another period of time when we had no running water in the operating theatres. So we couldn’t scrub up properly. So we had to use alcohol jelly on our hands.
TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, come on.
DR. NICK MAYNARD: There are occasions, and I’ve talked about the lack of nutrition given to patients. We had some days when there’s been no electricity in Gaza since October 7th. So the hospitals are totally reliant upon their own fuel sources to keep— which they get some from the United Nations as well, but they’re always under threat of running out of fuel.
And there have been multiple examples when fuel has run out from the hospitals. So when the fuel runs out, there is no power. When there’s no power, the ventilators don’t work, so patients on ventilators die. When there’s no fuel, the powers for the incubators for the newborn babies can’t work. So those babies die.
There was an episode about 18 months ago, I think, in Al-Nasser Pediatric Hospital in Gaza City. I think about 18 months ago when the Israeli military invaded the hospital, kicked out all the local staff, and there were 6 neonates left in the incubators when they were kicked out. And they said there are 6 babies there and they were assured they’d be fine. The Israeli military left after 2 or 3 weeks and the doctors, some of whom I knew, went back in there and those 6 babies were there in the incubators, dead, their bodies rotting.
TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, come on now.
DR. NICK MAYNARD: And there are many other similar stories like that. So these things are happening.
British Government Complicity
TUCKER CARLSON: How do you feel that your tax dollars go to the Israeli government?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: I’m appalled and I’m disgusted and I’ve said this to our politicians. We’ve gone and spoken to them. We’ve spoken to our Prime Minister. A few of us spoke to him.
TUCKER CARLSON: To Keir Starmer?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Yeah, to Keir Starmer. And we’ve talked about the fact that our government is still— they claim there’s an arms embargo. There isn’t. We’re still supplying parts for the F-35 jets. The Royal Air Force is flying reconnaissance flights from Cyprus over Gaza on a daily basis, giving military intelligence to the—
TUCKER CARLSON: Why?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: To the Israeli military. Because of the relationship we have with Israel, because of our support for Israel.
TUCKER CARLSON: But Israel murdered so many British diplomats and military officers at the founding of the country. Why? Why would the British government owe anything to Israel, which again was founded by murdering representatives of the British government?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: You’re absolutely right. I don’t know the answer to that. I mean, we can all speculate, but it is bizarre. I don’t understand it. I mean, there is the clearest evidence in my view that our governments are complicit in what’s going on there and they need to be held to account.
Returning to Gaza
TUCKER CARLSON: Last question. Do you plan to go back?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Yes, I’m trying to get in, in August. I’ve applied to go in. Many of the NGOs that I know well have been banned. So I’m trying to go in with another one at the moment. So I hope to. I know that because I’ve spoken out so much, the chance of Israel refusing me entry is very high. But I will keep going. I will keep trying.
TUCKER CARLSON: Or killing you once you get there.
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Yeah. I mean, there’s no question that being in Gaza is unbelievably dangerous. I’ve been injured out there from a bomb injury. There’s no question that it’s very dangerous. But statistically, there has not yet been a single foreign doctor killed there. And I’m not in any way understating the dangers of being there.
And of course, it’s a very dangerous place. And of course, at times you feel fear when you’re out there, but trying to explain what— I’m speaking on, as many others would, what motivates us. Whatever we feel at any one time is a complex mix of a whole different set of emotions. So fear is one of them. Desire to be there helping your friends is a very powerful incentive. And that, to me, when I’m out there is by far and away the dominant emotion. So that outweighs any fear we may have.
And a lot of us are like this. We have this— we’re so disturbed by what’s going on there. We’re so disturbed by how much our governments are complicit in this. What is being done to the Gazans is so fundamentally wrong, not just in the last 2 years, but for decades. What’s being done to them is so fundamentally wrong that those of us who’ve had the great privilege of knowing and loving the Gazan people for so many years and working with them have this absolute obligation, and I couldn’t imagine doing it any other way, of having to go out there and help them.
Family and Support
TUCKER CARLSON: What does your family think?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Very supportive. My wife, Fanoula, is as passionate as I am about the Gazans and the Palestinians. I mentioned earlier, we have a Gazan daughter, informally a Gazan daughter called Inas, who we love dearly. She’s never been able to go back to Gaza. She’s become a member of our family.
Our house has been, over years, a bit of a refuge for Gazan medical students and Gazan doctors who’ve managed to escape. They often come and stay with us, or we fix them up with other friends for accommodation. We’ve managed to take two wonderful Gazan medical students into Oxford. We’ve managed to get them part of our medical school now in Oxford.
So my wife— I don’t think I could do all of this without Fanoula’s support. And she’s as heroic as any of us in supporting me in this respect. And my kids likewise. I’ve got a daughter and two sons. They’re all very passionate. My daughter’s a full-time activist most of the time, but they’re all very supportive. And of course, before I go, I go and talk to them all individually and explain. They know why I’m going, and they— I go with their complete blessing.
TUCKER CARLSON: Godspeed, Dr. Maynard. Thank you very much.
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Thank you very much for meeting me, and I’ve really enjoyed it. If you made it through the end of that, thank you for watching.
TUCKER CARLSON: We’ll see you next Wednesday.
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