Tucker Carlson's Guest Reveals Evidence That Over 300 Medical Staff Were Executed; 'R*ped to Death' at Gaza's Shifa Hospital

A decorated British surgeon has gone on Tucker Carlson's programme to detail what he describes as systematic executions and sexual torture of Palestinian medical staff inside and around Gaza's Al-Shifa Hospital.

Dr. Nick Maynard, a consultant gastrointestinal surgeon at Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and recipient of the Humanitarian Medal from King Charles III, has worked inside Gaza on multiple occasions since 2010.

Speaking on The Tucker Carlson Show, Maynard described the scene he encountered when Palestinian medical crews were finally allowed back into Al-Shifa after Israeli forces withdrew in April 2024 and the fate of colleagues he personally knew. His testimony has re-ignited global scrutiny of Israel's conduct inside Gaza's hospitals and corroborates a body of UN and independent evidence that has been building for over a year.

What Dr. Maynard Told Tucker Carlson About Al-Shifa

Maynard told Carlson that when Palestinian medical staff re-entered Al-Shifa Hospital after Israeli forces left, they found the dead bodies of approximately 300 civilians inside the compound. Many had their hands bound behind their backs. Many had sustained bullet wounds to the head.

Among them, he said, were patients and healthcare workers he had known personally. 'There are multiple examples of healthcare staff who've been killed, healthcare staff who've been abducted,' he told Carlson during the interview. He placed the total number of healthcare workers illegally detained without charge at nearly 500.

Those figures track closely with what Gaza's Civil Defense documented on the ground. After Israeli troops withdrew from Al-Shifa on 1 April 2024, following a 14-day siege, CNN reported that Gaza's Civil Defense had recovered at least 300 bodies from the hospital complex, with the total later rising to 381 bodies in the vicinity of the site.

The Gaza Health Ministry said approximately 3,000 Palestinians had been sheltering inside the hospital when Israeli forces launched their raid on 18 March 2024, the second such operation at Al-Shifa in six months.

The Death of Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh Inside Israeli Detention

Central to Maynard's testimony is the case of Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh, 50, the head of orthopaedics at Al-Shifa Hospital, a colleague he had worked alongside in 2023. Dr. Al-Bursh was detained by Israeli forces on 19 December 2023 while treating patients at Al-Awda Hospital in northern Gaza and was taken to the Sde Teiman military detention facility. He later died in Ofer Prison in the occupied West Bank. The Israeli Prison Service confirmed his death, as reported by the BBC, stating that a prisoner detained on national security grounds had died at Ofer, though no cause of death was given.

Testimonies from fellow detainees, reported by Sky News and detailed in a Middle East Eye investigation, described Al-Bursh arriving at Ofer in a severely battered state, naked from the waist down and unable to stand. One detained physician, Dr. Khalid Hamouda, told investigators that Al-Bursh had difficulty walking or using the toilet without help during his time at Sde Teiman, and feared his ribs had been broken in beatings. Palestinian prisoner associations issued a joint statement describing his death as an 'assassination.'

UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, addressed the case directly on X in November 2024: 'A doctor. A stellar surgeon. The embodiment of Palestinian ethics. Likely raped to death.'

She went on: 'The racism of Western media who are not covering this, and Western politicians who are not denouncing this, together with the thousand other testimonies and allegations of rape and other forms of mistreatment and torture that Palestinians have suffered in Israeli jails, is absolutely sickening.' Israel has not publicly disclosed the cause of Al-Bursh's death.

UN War Crimes Finding and the Healthcare Workers Watch Report

Dr. Maynard directed viewers to the Healthcare Workers Watch report, 'The Killing, Detention and Torture of Healthcare Workers in Gaza', as the primary evidence base for the patterns he described. The organisation has confirmed the killing of 587 healthcare workers in Gaza since 7 October 2023, with a further 420 deaths under verification. Its data shows that 105 senior physicians, 23% of Gaza's most experienced doctors, have been killed or detained by the Israeli military since the war began.

This body of evidence fed directly into the findings of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, which released its third report in October 2024. The UN's Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights stated: 'Israeli security forces have deliberately killed, detained and tortured medical personnel and targeted medical vehicles.' The commission found these actions constituted 'the war crimes of wilful killing and mistreatment and the crime against humanity of extermination.' Israel called the inquiry 'outrageous' and said it was fully committed to international legal standards on the treatment of detainees.

In September 2024, UN Special Rapporteur on the right to health, Tlaleng Mofokeng, confirmed in a formal statement that Dr. Ziad Eldalou, an internal medicine physician at Al-Shifa detained on 18 March 2024 during an Israeli raid, had died in Israeli detention three days later, on 21 March. He was the third physician confirmed dead in Israeli custody since October 2023. The WHO had, by that point, recorded 1,043 health attacks across Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.

What Maynard's appearance on Carlson's programme demonstrated is that the documented evidence of what happened inside Gaza's hospitals has now reached audiences for whom that evidence was, until now, invisible.