Doctors warn an Israeli invasion of Rafah would be ‘apocalyptic’

After high-level meetings at the UN, four doctors back from Gaza are heading to Washington to meet US government officials

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A British surgeon who volunteered in a Gaza hospital early this year expressed serious concerns on Tuesday about the catastrophic impact of an Israeli military offensive in Rafah.

“If there’s an invasion of Rafah, it’ll be apocalyptic, the number of deaths we’re going to see” Prof Nick Maynard, a cancer surgeon at Oxford who also teaches at the university, told reporters in New York following high-level meetings at the UN.

Israel’s offensive in Gaza has displaced nearly 2.3 million people, caused a famine crisis, flattened most of the enclave, and killed over 31,000 people, according to Gaza’s health ministry.

Prof Maynard said that after researching the meaning of genocide, he believes the situation in Gaza “fulfills every single definition” he has read.

“The endgame of the Israeli government is to force them out completely from Gaza to eradicate them from that land,” he said.

“I saw the most appalling atrocities and I saw things that I never would have expected to have seen in any healthcare setting.

“I saw things at Al Aqsa Hospital which I still wake up at night thinking about. Appalling injuries in, particularly, women and children. The most devastating burns in small children.

“One child that I’ll never forget had burns so bad you could see her facial bones. We knew there was no chance of her surviving that but there was no morphine to give her.

“So not only was she inevitably going to die, but she would die in agony.”

He said the Israeli bombing of Gaza was widespread and indiscriminate, leading to the deaths of thousands of civilians.

The attacks, he added, were specifically aimed at hospitals, and intentionally demolished them “to make it almost impossible to provide anything resembling normal health care to the population of Gaza”.

Mr Maynard was last in Gaza in January with British charity Medical Aid for Palestinians.

When he returned, he met British Foreign Secretary David Cameron and Development Minister Andrew Mitchell to brief them on the situation in the enclave.

Dr Zaher Sahloul, president of the humanitarian charity MedGlobal, was also in Gaza in late January.

“If there is any offensive [in Rafah], they’re going to have a bloodbath, they’re going to have massacres after massacres,” Dr Sahlouf said in New York.

He estimates that 250,000 people will die directly and indirectly if the Israel-Hamas war escalates.

“We hope that it will not happen,” Dr Sahloul said.