Torture programmes and missile attacks on hospitals in Gaza
Oxford surgeon Nick Maynard on Tucker Carlson
by Peter F. Mayer*
(12 June 2026) A leading British surgeon from the University of Oxford has, in a sensational interview with Tucker Carlson, described in detail what he witnessed with his own eyes in Gaza: the systematic destruction of the healthcare system, targeted shootings of children at food distribution points, and an institutionalised torture programme against Palestinian doctors. The West looks the other way – and funds the whole thing.
(Picture www.tkp.at)
Professor Nick Maynard is not an activist. He is not a politician. He is not a member of any Palestinian organisation. Maynard is one of Britain’s leading gastrointestinal surgeons, working at Oxford University Hospital, specialising in oesophageal and gastric surgery. A man who has been travelling regularly to Gaza for over a decade to perform cancer operations and teach medical students. A man whose credibility cannot be dismissed with the cheap accusation of “anti-Semitism” intended to silence every other critic.
In an in-depth interview with Tucker Carlson, Maynard has now spoken out in detail.1 What he describes exceeds even the bleakest expectations of a war. This is not collateral damage. This is systematic.
The deliberate destruction of the healthcare system
Maynard knows Gaza’s hospitals like few others. Since 2010, he has worked in all the major hospitals – Shifa, Al-Aqsa, the Indonesian Hospital, the European Hospital and, most recently, the Nasser Hospital Complex in Khan Younis, the only large hospital in the Gaza Strip still functioning. The others? Destroyed. Not by accidental strikes, but by targeted attacks.
“Every single hospital has been attacked,” says Maynard. The figures are overwhelming: nearly 2,000 healthcare workers have been killed during this conflict – 75 per 100,000 inhabitants. By comparison: in Ukraine, this figure stands at 0.8 per 100,000. In all other conflicts in recent history, it has been in the single digits. 75. That is not a statistic; it is a targeted programme of extermination.
Maynard himself was operating at Al-Aqsa Hospital in January 2024 when an Israeli missile struck the intensive care unit right next to his operating theatre. Whilst he was operating. The team had to evacuate. The hospital was rendered non-functional. Maynard describes the standard Israeli claim – that Hamas command centres are located beneath the clinics – for what it is: a lie without a shred of evidence. “I have been in every square centimetre of these hospitals. I have seen nothing, absolutely nothing, to suggest a military Hamas presence.” The bombs consistently struck the clinical areas – where patients lay, where doctors worked, where medical students were studying, students whom Maynard had taught just a few weeks earlier.
“Target practice” at food distribution points
Perhaps the most disturbing accounts concern the so-called food distribution points run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). These distribution points, run by the US organisation under the leadership of the self-proclaimed “Christian minister” Johnny Moore, were staged as a grand humanitarian gesture. Maynard’s reports paint a radically different picture.
The surgeon describes a recurring pattern: food is laid out in a fenced-off area. The gates remain locked until far more people have gathered than there is food available. Then the narrow gates are opened, chaos breaks out – and at that very moment, Israeli soldiers and quadcopter drones open fire on unarmed civilians. The victims: predominantly teenage boys, aged 11, 12, 13 – families send the strongest to fetch food.
But what is truly shocking is the system behind it. Maynard and his colleagues at Nasser Hospital observed an eerie clustering of gunshot wounds:
- On one day: 19 teenage boys, all shot exclusively in the head and neck
- On another day: predominantly chest shots
- Yet another day: mainly abdominal shots
- On a Saturday: four boys, all shot exclusively in the testicles.
“It was beyond coincidence,” says Maynard. “It seemed to us as if a game was being played. Today we aim for the head, tomorrow for the abdomen.” A 12-year-old boy bled to death on the operating table in Maynard’s hands – shot through the aorta by an Israeli soldier whilst trying to fetch food for his starving family.
Channel 4 News has documented Maynard’s statements.2 The GHF and Johnny Moore – the same man who publicly claimed there was no hunger in Gaza – call these reports “Hamas propaganda”. Maynard’s response: “I don’t believe a word of what they say. The evidence I see with my own eyes is overwhelming.” Moore is now affiliated with Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia – a remarkable career for someone under whose watch children were shot at food distribution points.
Torture as a state programme
Maynard reports on a systematic programme of abduction and torture targeting Palestinian healthcare workers. Nearly 500 medical professionals have been abducted by Israeli forces since October 2023 and held in Israeli prisons without charge. None of them has ever been accused of a crime. None has received a trial.
Maynard has recorded detailed video and audio testimonies from survivors. What they describe belongs in the category of torture manuals used by authoritarian regimes:
- 60 days of continuous blinding whilst blindfolded
- Electric shocks to the genitals – a recurring speciality
- Beatings over 12-hour periods
- Forced to remain on one’s knees or seated for 60 days without interruption – lying down forbidden, sleep impossible
- Dogs fitted with cameras and firearms, sent to hospitals via remote control to specifically attack people.
A well-known orthopaedic surgeon, with whom Maynard had shared a coffee as recently as May 2023, was tortured to death. The cause of death, documented by investigative research by Sky News: daily rape over two weeks until death. His body was never returned.
A young plastic surgeon, with whom Maynard had worked at Shifa Hospital, was found dead about a mile from the hospital – hands tied behind his back, a bullet in his head. His mother lay beside him, also bound, also shot dead.
300 dead civilians were discovered following an Israeli withdrawal from Shifa Hospital – many with their hands tied behind their backs, many with gunshot wounds to the head. Patients. Staff. Unarmed people.
The organisation Healthcare Workers Watch has meticulously documented these cases.3 Maynard has submitted his statements to the International Criminal Court. The fact that this has had no impact on Western policy is the real scandal.
** Figures from the exhibition “Desperté en Palestina” (“I awoke in Palestine”), which was shown in Granada, Spain, in spring 2024. Organised by art professor Alfonso Masó in collaboration with local activists. The figures were formed from transparent adhesive film/packaging film, combined with plaster hands and modelled heads. The people depicted appear injured, traumatised or defenceless. The ephemeral, transparent material was deliberately chosen to represent vulnerability and dehumanisation.
Starvation as a weapon of war
Maynard describes the catastrophic food situation with the precision of a clinician. After Israel broke the ceasefire on 18 March 2025, the Israeli government imposed a complete blockade – not a single food item, no medical supplies, no baby food reached Gaza.
The consequences were immediately apparent in the operating theatre. Maynard operated on patients with severe but otherwise survivable injuries – yet the tissue failed to heal. “It was falling apart,” he reports. “Because they were so malnourished that the body had no resources left for wound healing.” There was no intravenous nutrition, no tube feeding. Little Habiba, an 11-year-old girl with a shattered oesophagus – Maynard’s speciality at Oxford – survived the complicated overnight reconstruction but died four weeks later. Not from the operation. But because the hospital had nothing to feed her.
In the neonatal intensive care unit, four premature babies starved to death because their malnourished mothers could not breastfeed and all formula milk had been confiscated at the border. American doctors had brought baby food with them – it was taken from them at the border.
Maynard himself lost eight kilograms in a month. He did not recognise a surgeon friend of his – the man had lost 40 kilograms.
The key witness the system cannot silence
What makes Maynard so dangerous to the Israeli propaganda narrative is not political activism. It is his complete institutional invulnerability. Oxford professor. Cancer surgeon. Humanitarian aid worker who has been going to Gaza for 16 years. Not a member of Hamas. Not a militant Islamist. A British doctor in his sixties who does nothing in Gaza other than what doctors do worldwide: save lives.
The British establishment’s reaction to his reports was telling. Maynard and colleagues presented Prime Minister Keir Starmer with a detailed dossier containing photographic and written evidence. They met with senior officials from the Biden administration – including Samantha Power, who became famous for her Pulitzer-winning book on genocide prevention and sat on the National Security Council during the Gaza war. Maynard laid laminated colour photographs on the table of babies with gunshot wounds to the head, of children without limbs, of starving children.
The reaction? Friendly nods. No action. Power is now back at Harvard.
The BBC, with whom Maynard spoke on several occasions, refused to broadcast his detailed reports on the systematic shooting of young people. According to Maynard, individual BBC journalists were desperate to broadcast the truth – and were stopped by their editorial management. Maynard calls the BBC’s practice of tagging every report from Gaza with the obligatory phrase “Hamas-led Ministry of Health”, whilst Israeli military spokespeople are allowed to speak without such restrictions, a “false balance”. The case of the Israeli spokesperson David Mencer, who slandered a doctor known personally to Maynard for 16 years on BBC Radio 4 as a “senior Hamas commander”, illustrates the method: presenting lies as an opinion on an equal footing.
Why all this is happening
Maynard puts it with the restraint of a scholar, but the conclusion is inescapable: “It seems to me to be a very clear mission of Israel to drive the Palestinians out of Gaza.” The destruction of the healthcare system, the killing of medical staff, the starvation of the population – none of these are mere side effects of a war against Hamas. They are the instruments of ethnic cleansing.
The death tolls underpin this assessment. The officially recognised Ministry of Health in Gaza – a fact no longer disputed by the Israeli military itself – counts over 76,000 people killed directly by acts of war. The medical journal The Lancet estimates that this figure is about 50 per cent too low due to the thousands of victims buried under the rubble. Added to this is the excess mortality caused by a lack of cancer treatment, destroyed dialysis machines, infectious diseases and, above all, systematically induced malnutrition. The most conservative estimates put the death toll at over 250,000 – more than 10 per cent of Gaza’s population. Other calculations are significantly higher.
The interview that shatters the narrative
The full conversation with Tucker Carlson is a document of extraordinary significance.4 Whilst the mainstream media either remain silent or water down their reporting in the name of “false balance”, Carlson provides the unfiltered platform that an eyewitness of this calibre requires.
Maynard’s statements are also so valuable because they elude any political co-optation. He makes no comparisons with the Nazis – the IHRA definition5 of antisemitism penalises precisely this comparison, thereby pre-emptively criminalising the most obvious historical parallel. Yet, as is well known, all Palestinians, just like all Arabs, are Semites; the genocide is therefore directed against Semites. Instead, Maynard simply describes what he has seen. And what he has seen is entirely sufficient.
What Maynard documented in Gaza – the targeted destruction of hospitals, the systematic starvation, the torture of doctors, the shooting of children at food distribution points according to a daily rotating body count – fulfils every conceivable definition of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The fact that Western governments not only tolerate this but finance it with taxpayers’ money makes them accomplices.
| * Dr Peter F. Mayer is a science and technology journalist. He is the publisher and editor-in-chief of “tkp – Der Blog für Science&Politik” and can be contacted at home@tkp.at. |
Source https://tkp.at/2026/05/28/oxford-chirurg-bei-tucker-carlson-ueber-folterprogramme-und-raketenangriffe-auf-krankenhaeuser-in-gaza/, 28 May 2026
(Translation “Swiss Standpoint”)
This is the original transcript by TCN (Tucker Carlson News): Doctor From Gaza Frontlines Exposes Israeli Torture Programs and Missile Attacks on Hospitals-EN
1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHPmW-XKfCM
2 https://www.channel4.com/news/teenagers-being-shot-by-israeli-soldiers-british-surgeon-in-gaza
4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHPmW-XKfCM
5 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Holocaust_Remembrance_Alliance