19.06.25
Editorial Note
On May 31, 2025, an article titled “The Shame of Israeli Medicine” was published by Prof. Neve Gordon, Dr. Guy Shalev, and Dr. Osama Tanous in The New York Review of Books. The authors claimed that Israel’s medical establishment has disregarded the field’s most basic ethical principle, the right to health.
Gordon, Shalev, and Tanous, the three Israeli academics, explained that affidavits are collected by Physicians for Human Rights–Israel (PHRI), a nonprofit organization “where one of us, Guy Shalev, is the executive director and another, Osama Tanous, is a board member.” The authors were “drawing on data gathered by rights organizations and the Palestinian Authority.”
The article discusses cases of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, among others, and states, “Palestinians in general and prisoners in particular have long been dehumanized.”
The article claims, “When Palestinian doctors working in Israeli hospitals were persecuted, the medical establishment refused to support them. The overwhelming majority of doctors—not to mention every Israeli hospital and the Israeli Medical Association—refused to condemn the destruction of Gaza’s health care system; some openly praised it and even called for the demolition of hospitals in Gaza. As these offenses accumulated, in most cases the country’s major medical-ethics institutions refused to speak out.”
The article argues, “The Israeli medical establishment has long had close ties with the state and security apparatus, not least because most senior officials come from the military Medical Corps. Leading hospitals have taken pride in joining war efforts: ‘In wartime, the civilian and military systems became one’.”
The article postulates, “in the first days of Israel’s attack on Gaza, cases of medical neglect and complicity escalated dramatically. On October 11, 2023, Israel’s Moshe Arbel, then Minister of Health, instructed hospital directors to refuse treatment to ‘terrorists’ and send them back to medical facilities belonging to the prison authorities and the military.”
For Gordon, Shalev and Tanous, “In practice, government officials and the mainstream media tend to apply the word ‘terrorist’ indiscriminately to Palestinian men between fifteen and seventy.”
The writers state, “Even as hospitals turned away Palestinian detainees, their own Palestinian employees—who comprise a quarter of all doctors and almost half of new doctors and nurses in Israel—found themselves under suspicion. About a week after October 7 several people sent complaints alleging that Abed Samara, director of the cardiac intensive care unit at Hasharon Hospital in Petah Tikva, had expressed support for Hamas on Facebook.”
Palestinian doctors and nurses have confided PHRI, according to Gordon, Shalev and Tanous, that “they fear posting anything that could be construed as political on their private social media accounts. Hospitals, they testify, have been suffused with an atmosphere of militarization, scrutiny, and silencing.”
The article mentions a medical worker who said in a report by the Mada al-Carmel Research Center, “Nowadays, to continue working in the hospital, you are required to become inhumane.” According to the authors, “You are not allowed to express sympathy for anyone dying on the other side, even if it is a child.”
The authors complained that Israeli medical staff “circulated an Instagram post featuring doctors dressed in military garb and stationed in Gaza.”
Moreover, Gordon, Shalev, and Tanous reject an Israeli claim that “the residents of Gaza saw fit to turn hospitals into terrorist nests to take advantage of western morality. [They] brought destruction upon themselves.”
The authors end their article by stating sarcastically that “Sheba Medical Center was named the eighth-best hospital in the world by Newsweek, a prestigious recognition that reflects not just Sheba’s reputation but that of Israel’s health care system as a whole. In a press release celebrating the designation, it promised that its doctors would ‘keep striving…to raise the standard of healthcare for all’.”
In response, Zion Hagay, the President of the Israeli Medical Association (IMA), and Malke Borow, the Director of Division of Law and Policy at IMA, refuted these allegations on behalf of IMA on the pages of the New York Review of Books. They stated, “We were deeply dismayed by many of the claims in your article… Its glaring omissions, selective interpretations, and misrepresentation of facts call for an urgent and clear response.”
Hagay and Borow posited that Gordon, Shalev, and Tanous provided an extremely one-sided view, “the piece makes no mention whatsoever of the unprovoked October 7th Hamas massacre—the horrific attack that precipitated the current war. Simply put, Hamas declared war on Israeli civilians, not the other way around.” The IMA response pointed out that Gordon, Shalev, and Tanous failed to “acknowledge the 251 hostages, many of whom were denied food, water, and medical care, and who endured unimaginable cruelty.” Accordingly, “It is not only possible—but essential—to grieve the devastation in Gaza’s health care system while also recognizing the calculated violence inflicted on Israeli civilians.”
For Hagay and Borow, the article by Gordon, Shalev, and Tanous “adopted an overtly biased tone, presenting unverified allegations as fact while ignoring any perspectives or evidence that might challenge its narrative.”
Hagay and Borow, speaking on behalf of the IMA, emphasized that their organization “consistently acted to uphold medical ethics and international humanitarian law.” They gave an example, “in January 2024, the IMA issued a public statement affirming that Israeli physicians must provide care to all individuals—regardless of identity, affiliation, or actions—based solely on their shared humanity. We reached out to hospital directors facing pressure to cease treating terrorists and reaffirmed their ethical responsibilities, offering the IMA’s full support.”
With regard to the bombing of Palestinian hospitals, Hagay and Borow stressed that the IMA “reaffirmed that medical facilities must never be deliberately targeted.”
According to Hagay and Borow, the article by Gordon, Shalev and Tanous ironically “references the Geneva Convention’s call for the protection of hospitals but omits the critical clause stating that such protection may cease if hospitals are used to commit harmful acts against the enemy.” They further argued that “to criticize Israeli doctors for joining the IDF and taking pride in defending their country. To imply that such service is incompatible with medical ethics is both unjust and profoundly naive.” The claim that the IMA has “failed grievously in its obligations to defend medical ethics” is “not only unfounded—it is clearly both false and offensive.”
Hagay and Borow ended by stating, “The New York Review of Books owes its readers a more honest and comprehensive portrayal of the complexities at hand.”
Worth noting that Prof. Neve Gordon, Dr. Guy Shalev, and Dr. Osama Tanous are all Israeli academics. Their article also appears on the pages of the Palestinian newspaper Alquds.
Gordon, formerly of Ben Gurion University, is currently teaching at Queen Mary University of London. He called for the boycott of Israel on the pages of the Los Angeles Times in 2008. Prior to that, he was recruited by Prof. Nezar alSayyad to produce an anti-Israel scholarship at UC Berkeley in 2004. In his book Israel’s Occupation, Gordon listed Israeli efforts to improve the standard of living of Palestinians after 1967’s victory, “In the health field practices were introduced to encourage women to give birth at hospitals (a means of decreasing infant mortality rates and monitoring population growth) and to promote vaccinations (in order to decrease the incidence of contagious and noncontagious diseases). Palestinian teachers were sent to seminars in Jerusalem, where they were instructed in methods of ‘correct’ teaching. A series of vocational schools were established to prepare Palestinians who wished to join the Israeli workforce, and model plots were created to train farmers. Many of these controlling devices aimed to increase the economic productivity of the Palestinian inhabitants and to secure the well-being of the population.” But for Gordon, all these good measures were merely acts of control.
Shalev is employed by the Hebrew University. His 2016 paper, “A Doctor’s Testimony: Medical Neutrality and the Visibility of Palestinian Grievances in Jewish-Israeli Publics,” published in Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, “follows the testimony of Izzeldin Abuelaish, a Palestinian physician who bears witness to his experiences working, living, and suffering under Israeli rule. He presents his story… to challenge the limited legitimacy of Palestinian grievances. In this paper, I explore his testimony as a medical voice that at once recounts the suffering and loss endured by the Palestinian people and also struggles to negotiate the values associated with being a ‘reliable’ witness.”
Tanous is a pediatrician and public health scholar based in Haifa and a visiting scientist at Harvard. His 2023 article, “On Settler Colonialism, Environment, and Health,” published by Jerusalem Quarterly, was refuted by a group of health scholars, who published a review essay titled “Identifying Settler Colonial Determinants of Health (SCDH) as the Upstream Cause of Palestinian Ill Health Is Both Incorrect and Harmful,” on the pages of Rambam Maimonides Medical Journal, in April 2025.
Israel Academia Monitor pointed out many times before that radical academic critics of Israel misrepresent International Humanitarian Law (IHL). Article 19 of the Geneva Convention, adopted in 1949, states, “The protection to which civilian hospitals are entitled shall not cease unless they are used to commit, outside their humanitarian duties, acts harmful to the enemy. Protection may, however, cease only after due warning has been given, naming, in all appropriate cases, a reasonable time limit, and after such warning has remained unheeded.” Gordon, who is now an “expert on international law,” should know that the Hague and Geneva Conventions consider using the civilian population as human shields, a practice that Hamas has perfected, to be a grave violation of IHL.
REFERENCES:
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2025/06/14/the-shame-of-israeli-medicine-an-exchange/In response to:
The Shame of Israeli Medicine, May 31, 2025
To the Editors:
We were deeply dismayed by many of the claims in your article entitled “The Shame of Israeli Medicine,” published recently. Its glaring omissions, selective interpretations, and misrepresentation of facts call for an urgent and clear response.
To begin with, oddly, the piece makes no mention whatsoever of the unprovoked October 7th Hamas massacre—the horrific attack that precipitated the current war. Simply put, Hamas declared war on Israeli civilians, not the other way around. The article also fails to acknowledge the 251 hostages, many of whom were denied food, water, and medical care, and who endured unimaginable cruelty. More than fifty (both dead and alive) remain in captivity today. It is not only possible—but essential—to grieve the devastation in Gaza’s health care system while also recognizing the calculated violence inflicted on Israeli civilians.
Secondly, the article adopts an overtly biased tone, presenting unverified allegations as fact while ignoring any perspectives or evidence that might challenge its narrative. In stark contrast, the Israel Medical Association (IMA) has consistently acted to uphold medical ethics and international humanitarian law.
For example in January 2024, the IMA issued a public statement affirming that Israeli physicians must provide care to all individuals—regardless of identity, affiliation, or actions—based solely on their shared humanity. We reached out to hospital directors facing pressure to cease treating terrorists and reaffirmed their ethical responsibilities, offering the IMA’s full support.
When reports emerged that certain Israeli doctors had endorsed the bombing of Palestinian hospitals, the IMA immediately condemned such statements, reaffirmed that medical facilities must never be deliberately targeted, and personally contacted each signatory to reinforce the ethical obligations of the profession.
Ironically, the article references the Geneva Convention’s call for the protection of hospitals but omits the critical clause stating that such protection may cease if hospitals are used to commit harmful acts against the enemy. This caveat is central to the debate. Claims that Hamas utilized hospitals for military purposes have been substantiated by reputable outlets, including The New York Times. Testimonies from both Israeli intelligence and video footage from Hamas members confirm that hospitals were used as command centers and to hold hostages.
On the matter of prisoner restraint, the IMA’s ethical stance long predates the current conflict. Our first statement was issued in 1997, the issue was revisited in 2008 and an updated edition was released in September 2023, prior to the war. Most recently, we reiterated this position in a February 2025 letter to the Ministry of Health.
The authors also criticize Israeli doctors for joining the IDF and taking pride in defending their country. No one longs more to return to the sanctity and relative comfort of clinical practice than these physicians—treating patients of all ethnicity and religions. But in the face of existential threats to the country, they are called to serve. To imply that such service is incompatible with medical ethics is both unjust and profoundly naive.
The claim that the IMA has “failed grievously in its obligations to defend medical ethics” is not only unfounded—it is clearly both false and offensive. We have long and consistently condemned any unethical behavior by Israeli physicians, investigated individual complaints, and reasserted our unwavering commitment to medical neutrality and humanitarian principles (latest statement).
In times of war, nuance matters. The New York Review of Books owes its readers a more honest and comprehensive portrayal of the complexities at hand.
Zion Hagay, M.D.
President, Israeli Medical Association (IMA)
Malke Borow, J.D.
Director, Division of Law and Policy, IMA
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The Shame of Israeli Medicine
Neve Gordon, Guy Shalev, and Osama Tanous
Faced with the destruction of Gaza’s hospitals and the systematic deprivation of Palestinians’ right to health, Israel’s medical establishment has disregarded the field’s most basic ethical principles. May 31, 2025
Gordon, Shalev & Tanous for NYBooks:
“In late March 2024 Israeli soldiers raided Nasser Hospital in the southern Gaza Strip. They arrested medical staff and patients, as well as civilians who were sheltering in the hospital compound. H., an orthopedic doctor, was partway through a shift when the soldiers began beating him. They kicked him in the stomach, groin, and testicles, told him to take his clothes off, handcuffed and blindfolded him, and escorted him to the hospital yard. Then they drove him across the Israeli border to the infamous Sde Teiman military base, near the southern city of Be’er Sheva, where at the time hundreds of Palestinians were being held blindfolded and shackled in overcrowded, filthy cages, some forced to sleep on the floor without mattresses or blankets.
In October 2024 H. gave an affidavit to Physicians for Human Rights–Israel (PHRI), a nonprofit where one of us, Guy Shalev, is the executive director and another, Osama Tanous, is a board member. H. recounted that at one point during his sixty-nine days at Sde Teiman his guards put him in a “disco room” with no mattresses, where deafening music blared at all times. Eventually they took him to an interrogation room, where, he testified, “for six days they tortured me by tying my hands and feet to a chair behind my back, hitting my stomach, and slapping me while I was blindfolded.” After forty-three days at Sde Teiman, he was sent to a prison not far from Tel Aviv to be interrogated.
There he saw a doctor, who affirmed that H. had developed inguinal and abdominal hernias as a result of the beatings. “He said I needed surgery and should not be interrogated,” H. said. But he was sent back to Sde Teiman without treatment. “As soon as I returned to the detention facility,” H. recounted, “the soldiers beat me up, banged my head on the ground and rubbed my face in the sand, kicked me and punched me.”
After another three weeks at Sde Teiman, they transferred H. once again, to a prison facility in Ashkelon, near the Gaza border. There he was seen by another doctor, who made him keep his blindfold on during the examination. “We are colleagues in the same profession,” H. said. “You are supposed to treat me humanely.” In response, he remembered, the Israeli doctor “slapped me while I was still blindfolded.” “You are a terrorist,” he recalls the man saying.
A few weeks later, at the Israel Prison Service’s medical facility in Ramleh, H. met with yet a third doctor, who confirmed in a ten-minute exam that he needed a hernia operation—yet the doctor insisted it was not urgent and H. was again returned, this time to Ofer prison. H. recalls in the affidavit that at a court hearing last July the judge extended his detention for forty-five days; neither there nor in the following interrogations was he given access to a lawyer. In August, when he appeared before a judge in a phone hearing, he was told that he is considered “affiliated with a terror organization.” Before the judge abruptly hung up the call, he told H. that he would be remanded to Ofer until further notice. “I am a doctor,” H. protested. Then the judge was gone.
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H. remains incarcerated at Ofer awaiting trial—one of the over 380 health care workers from Gaza who have been detained by Israeli forces since October 2023. (According to Health Care Workers Watch, two dozen of them have been subjected to enforced disappearance and remain missing.) Between July and December 2024 PHRI gathered testimony from twenty-four of these Palestinian medical professionals, who were held across civilian and military prison systems in Israel. Practically all of them described suffering torture in the form of severe beatings, continuous shackling, and sleep deprivation. According to documents that PHRI obtained through a freedom of information request, at least sixty-three Palestinians died in Israeli custody between October 2023 and September 2024, including the doctors Adnan al-Bursh, Iyad al-Rantisi, and Ziad al-Dalou, as well as the paramedic Hamdan Abu Anaba. Since then, drawing on data gathered by rights organizations and the Palestinian Authority, the group has determined that at least twenty-seven further detainees have died in the past nineteen months, bringing the total number to ninety. In comparison, nine inmates died in detention at Guantánamo Bay over a period of more than twenty years.
The affidavits gathered by PHRI reveal some recurring themes. One is the use of dogs to attack and humiliate prisoners. M.T., the head of the surgery department at the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza, told PHRI that soldiers from a counterterrorism unit called Force 100 raided his detention enclosure in Sde Teiman with dogs three days in a row, “beating prisoners and allowing the dogs to urinate and defecate on us.” K.S., a twenty-nine-year-old surgeon at al-Shifa Hospital, recounted that “they beat us with batons, with their fists, and let their dogs urinate on us. There are always dogs with them…. They attacked me twice with dogs.”
Another repeatedly cited abuse was pervasive medical neglect. Echoing other detainees, a twenty-seven-year-old general practitioner from al-Aqsa Hospital named M.S. described the scabies outbreaks in his prison ward. “Nobody is treating these infections,” he said, “nor anything else.”
Those who did manage to see Israeli doctors often had experiences similar to the ones that H. described. K.S. recalled a doctor telling him his scabies “would heal on its own.” N.T., a forty-nine-year-old surgeon who takes medication for hypertension, was denied access to a physician for months after he was detained during the March 2024 raid on Nasser Hospital. In his affidavit, he describes being taken to Sde Teiman, handcuffed and blindfolded, and forced to wear only underwear for the first seventeen days. He spent the next month in a detention facility called Anatot, near the Palestinian village Anata in the occupied West Bank, then the next two months at Ofer, where he finally saw a physician. The doctor prescribed medication—but only for ten days.
Neglect can be a death sentence. In his testimony M.T. recounted that another prisoner, M., had a stroke in the enclosure where prisoners with medical conditions were held. “A shawish [an inmate delegated as a go-between by the prison authorities] called for a nurse,” M.T. recalled, “who told him, ‘You’re not a doctor, don’t interfere.’” The following day they alerted the guard, then a Shin Bet officer. “They warned him that the prisoner was going to die,” M.T. said. At last a doctor showed up, “but M. was already dead.”
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In 1989 the South African physicians William John Kalk and Yosuf Veriava treated twenty political prisoners who had been hospitalized in Johannesburg after participating in a hunger strike. When the authorities asked them to send their patients back to detention, they refused, fearing that the men might be tortured. Known in the literature of medical ethics as “Kalk’s refusal,” their action has since served as a moral roadmap for doctors unwilling to violate their ethical obligations toward patients. In 1999 it was cited in the Istanbul Protocol, the most important UN guideline for medical professionals who are documenting cases of torture and ill-treatment, which instructs doctors to refrain from returning a detainee to the place of detention if an examination supports allegations of abuse.
Over the past year and a half, however, a different kind of refusal has characterized medical institutions in Israel. Some hospitals initially refused to treat wounded Palestinian detainees. Later some doctors continued to refuse on an individual level; many who did treat detainees failed to demand that their blindfolds and shackles be taken off. When Palestinian doctors working in Israeli hospitals were persecuted, the medical establishment refused to support them. The overwhelming majority of doctors—not to mention every Israeli hospital and the Israeli Medical Association—refused to condemn the destruction of Gaza’s health care system; some openly praised it and even called for the demolition of hospitals in Gaza. As these offenses accumulated, in most cases the country’s major medical-ethics institutions refused to speak out.
Demonstrators in Ramallah holding up posters of the Palestinian pediatrician Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, to protest his detention by Israel, January 14, 2025
The groundwork for these refusals has been laid for decades. Palestinians in general and prisoners in particular have long been dehumanized. The Israeli medical establishment has long had close ties with the state and security apparatus, not least because most senior officials come from the military Medical Corps.1 Leading hospitals have taken pride in joining war efforts: “In wartime, the civilian and military systems became one,” Yoel Har-Even, vice president of global affairs at Sheba Medical Center, said at the Jerusalem Post’s Miami summit this past December.
But in the first days of Israel’s attack on Gaza, cases of medical neglect and complicity escalated dramatically. On October 11, 2023, Israel’s then–health minister, Moshe Arbel, instructed hospital directors to refuse treatment to “terrorists” and send them back to medical facilities belonging to the prison authorities and the military. (In practice, government officials and the mainstream media tend to apply the word “terrorist” indiscriminately to Palestinian men between fifteen and seventy.) That same day Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv and Sheba Medical Center in Ramat Gan denied treatment to Palestinian detainees; a right-wing mob, meanwhile, stormed Sheba looking for “terrorists.” Less than a week later, reportedly fearing another such mob attack, Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem refused to admit an injured Palestinian man whom the military had brought to the emergency room for serious gunshot wounds. “Sources within the hospital” told Haaretz that treating him would “hurt national feelings.”
Soroka Hospital, in Be’er Sheva, took this practice further. In the ten months following Hamas’s October 7 attacks, according to Haaretz’s reporting, hospital staff called the police on at least three undocumented Palestinian women when they reached the emergency room. (Spokespeople for the hospital stressed to the journalists that this was a policy devised “in coordination with the police,” even after the police themselves “denied that such a directive exists.”) In one instance a pregnant Palestinian woman from the West Bank arrived experiencing contractions. Since 2013 she had been living with her husband in Rahat, a Bedouin town in Israel; her three children are Israeli citizens. Once the physician had seen her, she was detained by the police before even being formally discharged, taken to a West Bank checkpoint, and left stranded there until her husband picked her up and drove her to Jenin, where her parents live. She gave birth five days later.
Even as hospitals turned away Palestinian detainees, their own Palestinian employees—who comprise a quarter of all doctors and almost half of new doctors and nurses in Israel—found themselves under suspicion. About a week after October 7 several people sent complaints alleging that Abed Samara, director of the cardiac intensive care unit at Hasharon Hospital in Petah Tikva, had expressed support for Hamas on Facebook. On October 18 Yinon Magal—a television anchor, right-wing influencer, and former Knesset member—insisted on his telegram channel that Samara had “changed his profile picture to a Hamas flag, agitating and talking about the Muslims’ ‘Day of Judgment.’” The image in question featured a green flag bearing the Shahada, a saying repeated by every observant Muslim five times a day: “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is His Messenger.”
That same day the hospital suspended Samara after fifteen years of service. Israel’s brand-new health minister, Uriel Busso, insisted on social media that Samara had headed his profile with “Hamas flags” and written “words of support for the terrorist organization that slaughtered and murdered hundreds of Jews in cold blood.” By the time the police and Shin Bet notified the hospital that the picture had been posted in 2022 and merely expressed religious devotion, Samara had been subjected to death threats and hundreds of hate messages and had decided he no longer felt comfortable returning to work.
Other Palestinian doctors and nurses have confided in PHRI that they fear posting anything that could be construed as political on their private social media accounts. Hospitals, they testify, have been suffused with an atmosphere of militarization, scrutiny, and silencing. “Nowadays, to continue working in the hospital, you are required to become inhumane,” one medical worker said in a report issued by the Palestinian research center Mada al-Carmel. “You are not allowed to express sympathy for anyone dying on the other side, even if it is a child.”
*
Their Israeli colleagues have felt no such inhibitions about their own speech. Palestinian doctors and nurses who spoke to PHRI described overhearing coworkers suggesting that Israel should “ethnically cleanse Gaza,” “transform Gaza into rubble,” and “flatten it.” They have seen colleagues post messages on social media like the one recirculated on October 21, 2023, by a senior surgeon from Carmel Medical Centre in Haifa. Apparently first posted by someone serving in Gaza, it invoked the famous prisoner exchange Israel negotiated with Hamas for the release of the captured solider Gilad Shalit:
The UN is asking for a proportional response. So here, some proportions: for Gilad Shalit we released 1027 prisoners. One Jew is equal to 1027 terrorists. 1350 murdered Jews times 1027 [equals] 1,386,450 dead in Gaza. This is the proportion we have become accustomed to; I was happy to help.
This and other genocidal calls were not limited to the first weeks and months after the October 7 massacre. Nineteen months into the war on Gaza, Amos Sabo, a senior surgeon at Maccabi Healthcare Services, posted on X that he considered his reserve service a way of advancing public health by “eliminating cockroaches and other loathsome insects.” A few months earlier he wrote: “Gaza should be erased. There are no uninvolved people there.”
Hospitals themselves have likewise rallied on social media around Israel’s war in the Strip. In November 2023 Bnai Zion Medical Center in Haifa circulated an Instagram post featuring doctors dressed in military garb and stationed in Gaza, with the message “sending regards from the front.” A Sheba Medical Center Instagram story from June 2024 covered the “double life” of one of its doctors, who splits his time between the operating room and the cockpit of an F16 fighting jet. There are parallels between combat flying and surgery, the pilot says:
Both take you to the edge and both require precision, responsibility, decision-making under pressure, and the ability to deal with failure. There’s no such thing as “I almost hit the target”—either you hit it, or you didn’t. If you weren’t accurate at altitude, you crashed—if you cut a blood vessel one millimeter to the right, the result could be catastrophic.
These posts appeared at a time when Israel’s aerial and ground attacks were frequently killing scores of civilians a day and producing an extremely precarious environment for health care workers in Gaza, where, according to the UN, the number of health and aid professionals killed in military strikes is unprecedented in recent history.
In early November 2023—around the time the World Health Organization (WHO) reported that the Israeli military had already killed at least 9,770 Palestinians, including an estimated 4,000 children, and injured an additional 25,000—dozens of Jewish Israeli doctors published an open letter calling on the military to bomb Palestinian hospitals. The doctors were not dissuaded by the fact that fourteen out of Gaza’s thirty-six hospitals had already stopped functioning due to air strikes or shortages of fuel, oxygen, medicine, medical equipment, and food. Nor were they deterred by international humanitarian law, which stipulates that medical facilities “must be protected at all times and shall not be the object of an attack.” Because “the residents of Gaza saw fit to turn hospitals into terrorist nests to take advantage of western morality,” these doctors reasoned, they “brought destruction upon themselves.… Abandoning Israeli citizens while granting protection to mass murderers simply because they are hiding in hospitals is unthinkable.” One of the signatories, an American-born Israeli gynecologist named Chana Katan, explained: “I will do everything I can to defend and protect IDF soldiers and ensure they return safely to their homes. It is the IDF’s duty to bomb the terrorists hiding in hospitals in Gaza.” (UN officials as well as human rights organizations, such as Human Rights Watch, repeatedly emphasized that Israel had not provided sufficient evidence to substantiate its claims about militant groups’ use of hospitals. An analysis of Israeli visual material found those claims not credible.)
The acting head of the ethics committee at the Israeli Medical Association, Tammy Karni, soon issued a concise statement in response to the doctors’ letter. “Even in these sensitive days, in times of war, it is the role of doctors to treat the wounded,” Karni felt the need to explain:
Upholding a moral position is what distinguishes the State of Israel. Throughout history, Israeli doctors have not agreed to be dragged into the conscientious and moral decline that our enemy has reached…. The doctors of the IMA will not encourage crimes against humanity.
And yet less than three weeks later the IMA—a professional association that represents 95 percent of physicians in Israel—would itself sign on to a statement that, in effect, justified the Israeli army’s assaults on Palestinian hospitals in the Strip. In mid-November the Israeli military laid siege to al-Shifa Hospital, shelled its surroundings, cut off its supply of water and electricity, and sent ground troops into the compound, which then housed 7,000 displaced people, 1,500 healthcare staff, and 700 patients, including premature infants. Israeli military spokespeople had insisted that “Hamas’s headquarters” were located in tunnels directly under the medical facility—an accusation for which Israel failed to provide substantiating evidence, despite eventually occupying the entire site.
Starting on November 8, 2023, officials with the WHO and UNRWA had denounced the siege for its “disastrous” effect on medical conditions. On November 23 the ethics committees of six Israeli health associations—including the IMA, the National Association of Nurses, and the Israeli Psychological Association—sent a letter to the WHO not to join it in condemning the siege but to castigate it for its “silence” about Hamas’s alleged control of al-Shifa. Parroting the government’s delegitimizing rhetoric about the Palestinian health care system, the heads of the ethics committees explained that “once terrorists or militants see that no objections are raised when hospitals are used for combat, they will feel free to do so on other occasions and in other locations as well.”
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Meanwhile the members of these associations’ ethics committees have remained largely silent as health care staff in Israel violate the profession’s ethical principles. What began as an institutional policy of refusing to admit detained Palestinians in October 2023 soon turned into a pervasive practice of individual refusals by practitioners: late that month, upon the arrival of a fifteen-year-old detainee to a hospital in Israel’s Center District, one nurse refused to provide medical treatment, while another forcibly removed his intravenous drip and demanded his immediate transfer from the hospital. The pattern persisted for many months after the war started; a nurse at Kaplan Medical Center in Rehovot refused to treat a detainee as recently as this past February.
When detainees are admitted, their hands and legs are regularly shackled to the bed in what the guards call “four-point restraints.” One doctor confided to one of us that coworkers “withheld painkillers after invasive procedures, and then explained to colleagues that pain medication is a privilege that Palestinian detainees do not deserve.” After months of complaints submitted by PHRI’s ethics committee, in February the IMA at last issued a letter condemning “the restraint of prisoners and detainees in hospitals across the country.”
In still other cases detainees have received only minimal treatment before being sent back to a detention facility, even when their conditions were life-threatening. On July 6, 2024, a detainee was transferred from Sde Teiman to Assuta Hospital in Ashdod after suffering critical injuries to his neck, chest, and abdomen, as well as a ruptured rectum. The medical examination indicated that he had been subjected to torture and sexual violence while in custody. Immediately after the treatment, however, he was sent back to his torturers. According to Human Rights Watch, detainees at Sde Teiman could hear the screams of other inmates being tortured; doctors at the field hospital—where patients routinely arrived with injuries indicative of severe violence—would surely have heard them, too. Physicians working there were prohibited by military authorities from using their names or license numbers when examining prisoners or signing medical reports. When doctors are asked to conceal their identity in this way, the aim is usually to shield them from future scrutiny over their complicity in the facility’s abuses.
In April 2024 Haaretz reported that an Israeli physician had sent a letter to the ministers of defense and health and the attorney general detailing the harsh conditions to which Palestinian detainees were subjected at the facility and the tacit assent expected from the medical staff. “Just this week,” he explained, “two patients had their legs amputated due to injuries from being cuffed. Sadly, this has become routine.” The doctor went on to describe how patients were fed through straws, made to use diapers for defecation, and kept handcuffed and blindfolded at all times. “Since the early days of the field hospital’s operation,” he wrote, “I have been grappling with challenging ethical dilemmas…. We have all become partners in violating Israeli law. As a physician, I am even more troubled by the violation of my fundamental commitment to provide equal care to all patients—a pledge I made upon graduating twenty years ago.” (In a response to the paper’s reporter, the ministry of health insisted that “the medical treatment provided at Sde Teiman complies with the international rules and conventions to which Israel is committed.”)
Between February and April 2024 PHRI published two reports detailing how incarcerated Palestinians had been systematically deprived of the right to health. In both reports the group urged the IMA to ensure that detainees receive medical care in line with Israeli law, international treaties, and ethical medical standards. Finally, that April, Yossef Walfisch, the new chairperson of the IMA’s ethics committee, responded with an official statement. “Israeli physicians,” he stressed, “are required to adhere by international conventions, medical ethics principles, and the Geneva Declaration.” They “must provide all necessary medical care, whether in hospitals, prisons, or military facilities, and should be guided exclusively by medical considerations.”
He elaborated on that letter in an article on Doctors Only, a website for the country’s medical community. Yet even here Walfisch paired his lofty pronouncements about the significance of providing everyone humane medical care with attempts to deny the evidence of Palestinians’ horrific treatment. Again and again he referred to Palestinian patients as “Hamas terrorists.” Because the medical staff’s “safety takes precedence over any other ethical consideration,” he explained, the professional bodies responsible for incarceration ought to determine who should be restrained and blindfolded, and although health care staff in prisons and hospitals should strive for “a minimum of handcuffing,” on the whole they should follow the authorities’ guidelines. He invoked Sde Teiman but failed to say a single word about the beatings, torture, and medical neglect there. Instead he revealed that, when he visited the base’s medical team, he found staffers who “work day and night to provide the most suitable treatment within the limitations of this type of facility.” Echoing a self-congratulatory trope often used to describe the Israeli military, he called them “among the most moral doctors I have met.”
It is hard not to conclude that the IMA has failed grievously in its obligations to defend medical ethics. It could have criticized Israeli doctors who posted genocidal messages on social media, investigated health professionals who allegedly facilitated torture, and defended Palestinian doctors like Abed Samara who were wrongly persecuted for supporting terror. Instead it has not just turned a blind eye to these abuses but adopted Israel’s line of defense, blaming Hamas for Israeli transgressions in Gaza that include not only egregious crimes of starvation, murder, and forced displacement—widely acknowledged by rights groups as amounting to genocide—but more specifically the destruction of the Strip’s medical system, the killing of more than 1,400 health care workers, and the unlawful detention of nearly four hundred others.
In recent months the Israeli medical establishment’s silence has grown all the more deafening. Not a single prominent medical official, to the best of our knowledge, spoke up after reports emerged that, in the early hours of March 23, Israeli forces had ambushed and massacred fifteen Palestinian paramedics and aid workers who were carrying out a rescue mission in southern Gaza, then tried to cover up the crime by burying the bodies in a sandy mass grave alongside their smashed ambulances and fire truck; nor when it was revealed that a military spokesperson had lied about the atrocity, falsely claiming that the ambulances’ emergency lights were off when they arrived at the scene and accusing the murdered paramedics of having “advanced suspiciously.” No hospital director, dean of medical faculty, or IMA official said a word even after two witnesses from the UN retrieval team claimed that at least one dead aid worker had his hands bound, nor after the doctor who carried out the postmortems said that several had been killed by gunshots to the head and torso.
A month earlier, Sheba Medical Center was named the eighth-best hospital in the world by Newsweek, a prestigious recognition that reflects not just Sheba’s reputation but that of Israel’s health care system as a whole. In a press release celebrating the designation, it promised that its doctors would “keep striving…to raise the standard of healthcare for all.””
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“The Shame of Israeli Medicine”: How Israeli Doctors Turned on Palestinian Colleagues & Patients
StoryJune 05, 2025
Guests
- Neve GordonIsraeli political scientist who was the first director of Physicians for Human Rights-Israel.
- Guy Shalevmedical anthropologist and the executive director of Physicians for Human Rights-Israel.
Links
- “The Shame of Israeli Medicine”
- “Israel’s Occupation”
- “Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire”
We speak to political scientist Neve Gordon and medical anthropologist Guy Shalev about their new article, “The Shame of Israeli Medicine,” which looks at the “complicity of the Israeli medical establishment with Israel’s egregious violations of international law.” The article’s third author, Osama Tanous, is a Palestinian citizen of Israel and has not been able to make media appearances for fear of reprisal by the Israeli government. “The Israeli medical establishment in general identifies with Israel’s colonial project and puts the colonial project over the most basic ethical principles of their profession,” says Gordon, who previously served as the inaugural director of the organization Physicians for Human Rights-Israel. Shalev, the current executive director of the group, connects the Israeli military’s targeting of healthcare workers and infrastructure in Gaza with its silencing of the great number of Palestinians who make up the medical workforce in Israel. The authors call for an international boycott of Israeli medical institutions, until “Israel stops its colonial project, [and] after the Palestinians receive liberation and self-determination.”
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Earlier today, Israel attacked the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza City. It marked the eighth time the hospital has been attacked over the past 600 days. Three Palestinian journalists were killed at the hospital. A fourth journalist was seriously wounded. We turn now to look at how the Israeli medical establishment has responded to Israel’s systematic attacks on Gaza’s health system.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by the co-authors of a new article headlined “The Shame of Israeli Medicine,” published in The New York Review of Books. Joining us in Tel Aviv, in Israel, is the medical anthropologist Guy Shalev, who serves as executive director of Physicians for Human Rights-Israel. And in London, the Israeli political scientist Neve Gordon, who was the first director of Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, he’s a professor of international law and human rights at Queen Mary University of London.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Professor Neve Gordon, let’s begin with you. Talk about what you found.
NEVE GORDON: What we found is that the support for Israel’s assault on Gaza, the genocidal assault, including the decimation of its medical system, including the killing of 1,400 health workers, including the detention and disappearance of 400 medical doctors and healthcare workers, including the torture of detainees, has been supported by the Israeli medical establishment through and through, whether it’s from the top, the Israeli Medical Association, that represents 95% of Israeli doctors, the other healthcare associations, including the Nursing Association and the psychological associations and their ethical committees.
We found that hospitals did not accept Palestinian detainees who were wounded and needed medical care. We found that doctors inside hospitals were unwilling to treat Palestinian detainees or did not demand that the shackles from their legs and their arms and their blindfold be removed before they were treated. We found that doctors did not provide painkillers to Palestinians, claiming that they should suffer from the pain. We found doctors in Israeli hospitals that sent, posted genocidal messages on their private social media accounts. We found persecution of medical doctors and nurses, Palestinian medical doctors and nurses, in the Israeli establishment. So, there’s a whole system. The whole medical establishment inside Israel has been actually supporting Israel’s assault on the Palestinian people, and particularly on its healthcare system.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Now, Guy Shalev, you are joining us from Tel Aviv. You are the executive director of Physicians for Human Rights-Israel. It is this organization, your organization, that gathered testimony from 24 of these Palestinian health workers. Can you explain how the testimony was collected, and, you know, the key things, what most surprised you about what you found?
GUY SHALEV: Right. So, first of all, it was impossible to collect testimonies for many months, since the beginning of the war. In the beginning, there was no access to detainees. We could not send lawyers to visit them. We could not have any kind of supervision of their conditions of how they’re being held. After approximately six months, we could have starting — we could start to send lawyers to visit them, to collect the testimonies.
And then, what we heard was just impossible to hear: doctors that were detained while they were doing their work in hospitals, other doctors who were detained while crossing checkpoints across Gaza, after the soldiers found out that they are doctors, and then being taken to facilities in Israel — most famous, probably infamous, is the Sde Teiman facility — being subjected to torture, medical neglect, violence, starvation. Four doctors — three doctors and one paramedic died in Israeli facilities. These are four out of the 90 Palestinian detainees who died in the past 20 months.
And we tried to figure out what was the reason why doctors were targeted in such a way. And we realized that in their investigations, they were asked to provide information or kind of reveal the structure of hospitals and what they know, which is a violation of the international law and protection of medical workers. You cannot detain a medical worker for the purpose of collecting information, if you don’t have any evidence that they violated any law. And in fact, these people, most of these people, were held without a trial, without charges. Many of them are still held. Approximately 150 medical personnel are still held in Israeli detention facilities.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Guy Shalev, you also point to an extraordinary statistic regarding the number of Palestinians who work in the Israeli medical establishment. You say Palestinians comprise 25% of all doctors and almost 50% of all new doctors and nurses in Israel. So, can you explain how they have been treated in the months since October 7th, these Palestinians who work in Israeli hospitals?
GUY SHALEV: Right. And, yes, first of all, these are amazing numbers, and this is the outcome of a long process of many years of Palestinians studying medicine, both in Israel and abroad, and choosing medicine as their kind of profession for the reasons that many people in the world choose that profession, but also for the reason that many minorities and people of marginal communities choose medicine, because they see that as an opportunity for social mobility, an opportunity to be accepted as equal. And that is why we see a lot of doctors in the Israeli medical system.
And unfortunately, this ideal of a system that is — that considers them as equal was never a reality, and definitely not after October 7, when there was basically a witch hunt of Palestinian medical workers in the Israeli system. Social media profiles were scanned to see whatever they’re posting there. And then a very large number of doctors and medical workers were subjected to hearings and other kind of processes, including firing doctors and medical workers for just the most basic social media posts, such as supporting children in Gaza or just feeling compassion for the people of Gaza. And it created this atmosphere that basically silenced and censored an entire group of doctors and medical workers in the Israeli system.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re speaking with two of the three authors of the piece, “The Shame of Israeli Medicine,” published in The New York Review of Books. We’re speaking with the medical anthropologist Guy Shalev in Tel Aviv and with Neve Gordon, professor, speaking to us from London. The third author is Dr. Osama Tanous, a pediatrician, board member of Physicians for Human Rights-Israel. He was advised by his lawyers not to do the interview. Guy Shalev, can you explain why?
GUY SHALEV: Yes, this is exactly what we just talked about. It is just too risky for a Palestinian citizen of Israel to be publicly kind of resisting the war, publicly criticizing the Israeli establishment. And we’ve seen cases. For example, professor Nadera Shalhoub, a very famous professor in the Hebrew University, who participated — was interviewed in a podcast and was later — had to resign from the university for very basic kind of critical opinions, professional critical opinions she had over the Israeli policies in Gaza. So, the risk is, unfortunately, high. And we are — we’re sorry that his voice is silenced once more, once again, because Neve and I are here, and Osama is not.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Professor Neve Gordon, if you could say what exactly are you calling for?
NEVE GORDON: Well, I think what we managed to show in the article is the complicity of the Israeli medical establishment with Israel’s egregious violations of international law, including the Genocide Convention. And what we also know from past experience and from what we detail in the article is that change will not emerge from within without pressure from without.
And so, what we think — or at least I think — is that the international medical establishment and medical community needs to put pressure on their counterparts in Israel in order that they raise their voice against Israel’s policies. The Israeli medical establishment in general identifies with Israel’s colonial project and puts the colonial project over the most basic ethical principles of their profession. And that, we think, needs to change. So, one very practical idea is that students and staff in research institutions in the United States, Canada, in the U.K., in Europe map the kinds of partnerships their institutions have with Israeli medical institutions, with Israeli research teams, with Israeli medical corporations and demand from their own institutions to cut these partnerships, to cut ties with these partnerships, to end the contracts with Israeli medical corporations — not as a principle, but as a strategy, saying to their Israeli counterparts, “We’ll be happy to carry out these partnerships again, we’ll be happy to do business, but only after Israel stops its colonial project, after the Palestinians receive liberation and self-determination.” It is time, we think, that the international community boycott the Israeli establishment in order to bring about change and to stop this genocide we’re witnessing.
AMY GOODMAN: Neve Gordon, we want to thank you for being with us, Israeli political scientist, the first director of Physicians for Human Rights-Israel. He’s a professor of international law and human rights at Queen Mary University of London, speaking to us from London. And Guy Shalev, executive director of Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, speaking to us from Tel Aviv. We’ll link to your new article, “The Shame of Israeli Medicine,” published in The New York Review of Books.
Next up, we go to the British journalist Carole Cadwalladr, talking about taking on the broligarchy. Back in 20 seconds.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: “Black Spartacus Heart Attack Machine” by Tom Morello here in our Democracy Now! studio.
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April 14, 2025
Why I Don’t Cheer for Israel’s ‘Pro-Democracy’ Movement
In conversations about Israel and Palestine, I am often asked about my views on the internal resistance to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
My questioners point to hundreds of thousands of Israelis who have been taking to the streets to protest against the government and its efforts to introduce a judicial overhaul over the past two years and inquire why I remain apathetic to these efforts to end Netanyahu’s rule.
My answer is simple – the real problem facing Israel is not its current government. The government might fall, but until we radically transform the nature of the regime, not much will change, and particularly not in relation to the basic human rights of Palestinians. A recent Israeli Supreme Court decision underscores my point.
On March 18, 2024, five Israeli human rights organizations filed an urgent petition with Israel’s Supreme Court, asking the court to instruct the Israeli government and military to fulfill their obligations under international humanitarian law and address the civilian population’s humanitarian needs amid the catastrophic conditions in Gaza.
The petition was submitted at a time when aid was entering Gaza, but the amount crossing the border was far from sufficient to meet the minimal needs of the population, of whom 75 percent had already been displaced. The rights groups wanted the government to lift all restrictions on the passage of aid, equipment and personnel into Gaza, particularly in the north where there were already documented cases of children dying from malnutrition and dehydration.
The court did not issue a ruling for more than a year, effectively allowing the government to continue restricting aid unchecked. Three weeks after the rights groups filed the petition, the court convened only to provide the government additional time to update its preliminary response to the petition. This set the tone for how the petition would proceed over the next 12 months.
Each time the petitioners provided data on the worsening conditions of the civilian population and emphasized the urgent need for judicial intervention, the court simply asked the government for further updates. In its April 17 update, for example, the government insisted that it had significantly increased the number of aid trucks entering Gaza, claiming that between October 7, 2023, and April 12, 2024, it had allowed 22,763 trucks to cross the checkpoints. This amounts to 121 trucks per day, which according to every humanitarian agency working in Gaza, does not come close to meeting the population’s needs.
In October 2024, at least half a year after the petition was submitted, the rights organizations asked the court to issue an injunction after the government deliberately blocked humanitarian aid for two weeks. In response, the government claimed that it had been monitoring the situation in northern Gaza closely and that there was “no shortage of food”. Two months later, however, the government confessed that it had underestimated the number of Palestinian residents trapped in northern Gaza – thus acknowledging that the aid entering the Strip was insufficient.
On March 18, 2025, after Israel breached the ceasefire agreement and resumed its bombardment of Gaza and the minister of energy and infrastructure halted the supply of electricity to the Strip, the petitioners submitted yet another urgent request for an interim order against the government’s decision to prevent the passage of humanitarian aid. Again, the court failed to issue a ruling.
Finally, on March 27, more than a year after the rights organizations had filed the petition, the court issued a verdict. Chief Justice Yitzhak Amit and Justices Noam Sohlberg and David Mintz unanimously ruled that it lacked merit. Justice David Mintz interlaced his response with Jewish religious texts, characterizing Israel’s attacks as a war of divine duty, while concluding that, “[The Israeli military] and the respondents went above and beyond to enable the provision of humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, even while taking the risk that the aid transferred would reach the hands of the Hamas terrorist organization and be used by it to fight against Israel.”
Thus, at a time when humanitarian agencies have pointed again and again to acute levels of malnutrition and starvation, Israel’s Supreme Court – both in the way it handled the judicial process and in its ruling – has ignored Israel’s legal obligation to refrain from depriving a civilian population of objects indispensable to their survival, including by wilfully impeding relief supplies. In effect, the court legitimized the use of starvation as a weapon of war.
This is the court that hundreds of thousands of Israelis are trying to save. It’s March 27 ruling – and almost all other rulings involving Palestinians – reveal that the Supreme Court of Israel is a colonial court – one that protects the rights of the settler population while legitimizing the dispossession, displacement, and horrific violence perpetrated against the Indigenous Palestinians. And while the Supreme Court might not reflect the values of the existing government – particularly on issues relating to political corruption – it undoubtedly reflects and has always reflected the values of the colonial regime.
Hence, the liberal Zionists who fill Tel Aviv’s streets every weekend are not demonstrating against a judicial overhaul that endangers democracy, but against an overhaul that endangers Jewish democracy. Few of these protesters have any real qualms about the court’s horrific ruling on humanitarian aid, or, for that matter, on how the court has consistently upheld Israeli apartheid and colonial pillars. The regime, in other words, can continue to eliminate Palestinians unhindered as long as the rights of Israel’s Jewish citizenry are secured.
This article first appeared in Al Jazeera.
Neve Gordon is a Leverhulme Visiting Professor in the Department of Politics and International Studies and the co-author of The Human Right to Dominate.
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European Forum
at the Hebrew University
Postdoctoral Fellow
Martin Buber Society of Fellows, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
https://buberfellows.huji.ac.il/people/guy-shalev
Guy Shalev is a medical anthropologist interested in the intersections of professional and national politics in the Israeli health sphere. His research considers the everyday border-work that marks the lives of Palestinian physicians in the Israeli public health system and ask how medical expertise and ethics play a role in ethnonational politics both within and without the medical field.
Selected publication:
- Shalev, Guy. 2016. A Doctor’s Testimony: Medical Neutrality and the Visibility of Palestinian Grievances in Jewish-Israeli Publics. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 40(2), 242-262.
Additional link: https://unc.academia.edu/guyshalev
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University of Haifa
Minerva Center for the Rule of Law Under Extreme Conditions
Guy Shalev was a postdoctoral fellow at the Minerva Center for the Rule of Law Under Extreme Conditions between October 2021 and September 2023. Guy is the Executive Director of Physicians for Human Rights Israel. He is a medical and political anthropologist with a strong interest in the intersection of medical professionalism, ethnonational politics, and bioethics in Israel/Palestine. He received his Ph.D. in Cultural and Medical Anthropology from The University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill in 2018 and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Martin Buber Society of Fellows at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Guy’s publications have appeared in American Anthropologist , Israeli Sociology, and Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry.
israel-academia-monitor.com 