Dear Ed
I went to a talk by Professor Nick Maynard on Friday, where he shared his experiences volunteering as a surgeon in Gaza over the last three years.
You know Professor Maynard. He came and gave you and some of your colleagues a personal presentation of what he shared with a large audience here in Cheltenham on Friday. I hope you were as moved as we all were. Hearing such first-hand testimony is so much more shocking than reading about it.
I wonder which particular part of his testimony has stayed with you?
For me, it was his account of treating young boys shot as they tried to collect food for their families from one of the very few collection points sanctioned by Israeli Occupying Forces. On one day, they would be almost exclusively treating headshots; on the next, shots to the abdomen; on the third, chest wounds; on the fourth, shots to the testicles.
There is literally no possibility of this being ‘coincidental’. Which means those Israeli soldiers were engaged in target practise, selecting a different body part every day.
Did that stick in your mind, Ed, listening to Professor Maynard?
Or was it his personal stories about just a few of the four and a half thousand child amputees that he’d been assisting during that time he was there?
Or was it his testimony about the death of those he knew of the 1,750 healthcare workers deliberately targeted by the Israeli Occupying Forces, or of the 450 healthcare workers abducted and tortured?
Or his account of the more generic impacts of what’s been going on since October 2023: the 21,000 children killed (around 115 a day); or the 17,000 ‘WCNSFs’ — Wounded Children No Surviving Family — a fitting acronym for this particular genocide; or the two teachers, one UN worker, one journalist killed every day during that time. With all this – and a lot more – data provided to you and your predecessors in excruciating detail by the UN.
I don’t need to go on. You heard it at first hand from Professor Maynard. You will have seen the same images that I saw on Friday night, and which I cannot easily move on from…
Professor Maynard was very discrete. He didn’t tell us anything confidential about his meeting with you. But it obviously left me speculating about what you, as a Foreign Secretary and as a decent, compassionate man (as I know, personally, having worked with you 20 years ago), will be doing about it?
I do seriously hope that your newfound concern for the daily war crimes being committed in the West Bank by Israeli settlers (with the full support of the Israeli army) will not be the end of your ‘change of approach’ on Israel? I sincerely hope it will be just the start.
And did you at least, then and there, agree that your Government will commit a substantial sum of UK taxpayer’s money (80% of whom oppose Israel’s actions, and 50% of whom believe it is committing a genocide in Gaza) to support the work of the organisation that Professor Maynard speaks on behalf of — Medical Aid for Palestinians?
There are a few of us who have not entirely given up on this Labour Government in terms of recalibrating its response to the genocide in Gaza, and to the endless war crimes in the West Bank and in Lebanon. But you and your Prime Minister have only a few short weeks to prove us right.
Yours in increasingly forlorn hope,
Jonathon Porritt 7 September 2026
(Working on the assumption that Ed’s civil servants will have advised him not to make any such contribution to Medical Aid for Palestinians, perhaps you might be able to step in to help https://www.map.org.uk/how-to-help/donate/?mapid)
