Since the start of the genocide in Gaza, health workers have been among the loudest voices exposing Israel’s attacks on healthcare. Nurses, doctors, and other medics warned relentlessly that the systematic destruction of health and life in Palestine is a blueprint for what could follow if occupation authorities are not stopped. They helped mobilize millions around the world – yet they also faced censorship and attempts to discredit them inside their own professional spaces.

Recent experiences by health professionals suggest these are not isolated incidents but part of a coordinated strategy to delegitimize medical expertise when it counters Israel’s claims about attacks on Palestinian, Lebanese, and other patients, medics, and infrastructure.

Read more: Dr. Ghassan Abu Sitta: “Israel was able to weaponize life itself”

As part of this trend, surgeon Dr. Ghassan Abu Sitta was accused of antisemitism before medical regulatory bodies in Britain, a campaign that included lobbying by the group UK Lawyers for Israel. Late last year, public health expert Dr. Mary Bassett was removed as head of Harvard’s Frances-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights following campaigns by pro-Israel groups. Similarly, health workers and academics with expertise on conflict health are continuously undermined at conferences and meetings through postponements, restrictive speaker guidelines, and attempts at public discreditation.

Dr. Eveline Hitti, a professor of emergency medicine, notes that lobbying for censorship of scholarly work dealing with health in Palestinian and Lebanese populations is especially pronounced in academic settings. “These are the spaces where discussion about health in Gaza have been most heavily policed,” she told BreakThrough News, “precisely because of the credibility of the people producing this work and the ripple effect it has across the medical community.”

The weaponization of objectivity and medical neutrality

Last month, only hours ahead of a discussion on healthcare in conflict and displacement settings in West Asia, planned to be hosted by the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine’s (SAEM) Global Emergency Medicine Academy, speakers were informed that the talk was to be postponed. Informally, they were told the decision had come after an intervention by the American Jewish Medical Association (AJMA) to SAEM’s leadership complaining about the set-up.

AJMA’s representatives reportedly argued the webinar would present a definitive take on a “contested geopolitical conflict.” The featured speakers included Dr. Hitti, who helped lead Lebanon’s COVID-19 response and healthcare activities in the aftermath of Israel’s pager attacks, and Assistant Professor Dr. Thaer Ahmad, who worked in Gaza’s emergency services during the genocide. On more than one occasion, building on available medical data, both Dr. Hitti and Dr. Ahmad exposed the devastating impact of Israel’s attacks on health in Gaza and Lebanon. Their scholarly work helped counter attempts by Israel itself and pro-Israel advocates to claim that attacks on Palestinian and Lebanese hospitals and health workers are anything other than what they are under international law: crimes.

AJMA resorted to a well-known tactic by implying the webinar would be “one-sided” without the presence of an Israeli speaker. Pro-Israel groups continue to call for “both sides” to be represented at the table as they attempt to silence criticism of the ongoing genocide, trying to equate such criticism with antisemitism.

In medical settings, the tactic is often reinforced through the misuse of the concept of medical neutrality. These organizations weaponize the principle – meant to uphold the right of all patients to care within conflict irrespective of their role or side – to claim that health professionals have no place in any political debate. The argument is adapted and has increasingly been used at different levels of health governance, from webinars like SAEM’s to the halls of the World Health Organization (WHO), where the Israeli delegation regularly cries “politicization” as WHO members discuss health conditions in Palestine.

Read more: Researchers warn of “de-healthification” in Palestine as infections spread in Gaza

Yet as Dr. Hitti points out, the guiding principle for physicians and other health workers should be to protect the right to health by upholding human rights and adhering to evidence, international law, and medical ethics – not the pursuit of artificial political “balance.” In fact, when dozens of United Nations experts and humanitarian organizations, including Physicians for Human Rights Israel, as well as countless scholarly articles in peer-reviewed journals have documented Israeli war crimes, it becomes difficult to argue that including the occupation’s representatives would lead to a sound academic discussion.

Dr. Hitti emphasizes that insisting on “representation” imposes a standard not applied to other academic sessions. “A panel on the health consequences of tobacco is not biased because it lacks tobacco industry representation,” she points out. “When we present in academic settings,” she adds, “we are required to uphold academic integrity standards by grounding our talks in strong medical evidence.”

“Their demand to include representatives from the occupying forces is, in fact, imposed political advocacy.”

“AJMA supports and celebrates Israel!”

Materials available on AJMA’s channels suggest this instrumentalization of “balance” and “neutrality” is central to the organization’s approach. Founded in “the aftermath of October 7, 2023,” AJMA states it has approximately 3,000 members and supporters, whom it allegedly supports in addressing antisemitism, mainly in health workplaces. “Healthcare environments must remain safe, professional, patient-centered, and free from ideological hostility,” they write on their website.

At the same time, AJMA’s activities include participating in New York’s Israel Day Parade – in 2024, 2025, and 2026 – to “show that the AJMA community supports and celebrates Israel.” Throughout the genocide, the association has organized “solidarity healthcare missions” to Israel and co-hosted screenings of the disputed film “Screams Before Silence.”

It has also organized a long list of public events. None of those related to the ongoing conflicts in West Asia appear to have included speakers from Palestinian, Lebanese, or Iranian organizations. They have, however, featured co-organizers and speakers from the Dinah project, the Anti-Defamation League, and NGO Monitor, as well as former Israeli intelligence officials to speak on the war on Iran.

AJMA’s listed partners include the Israeli Medical Association (IMA), an organization that health workers around the world are calling to be suspended from the World Medical Association (WMA) over its complicity in Israel’s crimes in Gaza. Among others, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor warned the IMA had provided institutional cover for attacks on Gaza’s health system and “lobbied to block international ceasefire calls, prioritizing military alignment over its humanitarian duty to protect life.”

The partnerships pursued by AJMA – including with organizations called out for enabling war crimes – suggest its commitments lie with “supporting and celebrating Israel” rather than protecting medical neutrality.

Conference organizers “in a difficult position”

The approach is not specific to AJMA nor limited to the SAEM webinar. Dr. Hitti notes that this is the third time she has experienced what seemed to be concentrated attempts to censor health-related discussions on Gaza and Lebanon in academic settings. Earlier examples included a presentation she gave at the International Emergency Medicine Conference (IEMC) in Montreal and a panel she was organizing at the Mediterranean Emergency Medicine Conference (MEMC) in 2025.

At IEMC, Dr. Hitti was asked to hold a plenary on Mass Casualty Response to hybrid warfare – a tactic much used by Israel, to which she led the response on multiple occasions. While the audience’s standing ovation spoke to the overwhelmingly positive response, she emphasizes, the organizers later let her know it had put them “in a difficult position.” In response, they proceeded to release new speaker guidelines that require presenters to declare their “political conflict of interest.”

Moreover, they expanded speaker selection criteria beyond assessment of content expertise to include review of the speaker’s social media activity and public media presence. The new guidelines now require speakers “to submit plenary presentations slides” for review by “speaker coaches” who would screen for “concerning content”– all amounting to curated speech suppression within spaces that are meant to honor academic freedom.

The difficult position IEMC organizers referred to might be linked to a document that Doctors Against Racism and Antisemitism (DARA) submitted to the Canadian Senate. In it, the organization argued one of the interventions at the conference – presumably Dr. Hitti’s – was part of a worsening climate of antisemitic hatred in the medical community. They wrote the following: “It [the presentation] also mischaracterized Israel’s September 2024 ‘pager operation,’ a targeted military action against Hezbollah operatives, a ‘war crime’ … The speaker also accused Israel of bombing hospitals in Gaza, omitting Hamas’s documented use of these facilities as Hamas command centers, weapons depots, and hideouts for Hamas operatives.”

Watch: Israeli terror in Lebanon: inside the pager attacks

However, while accusing health workers of antisemitism for standing in solidarity with Palestine, DARA’s brief made no reference to the fact that UN experts described Israel’s pager attack as “terrifying violations of international law.” At the time, UN experts emphasized that the detonation of communication devices in civilian spaces constituted a severe breach of humanitarian norms. Similarly, DARA did not mention the extensive audiovisual and written materials documenting the destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure. Nor did they note that several mainstream outlets have debunked claims that Palestinian hospitals were being used as cover for military operations. Instead, DARA insisted that genocide should not be discussed among health workers as “a medical diagnosis.”

Medical associations must stand up to pro-Israel groups pressure, health workers say

By attempting to silence health workers’ and academic’s voices, pro-Israel groups are undermining some of the most essential humanitarian values medicine is supposed to uphold. Additionally, by trying to limit space for documenting the impacts of Israel’s attacks on healthcare in West Asia, these organizations are also contributing to obscuring information about the conditions in which care is being delivered in Palestine, Lebanon, and other countries under attack – as well as ongoing attacks on other health workers.

This is echoed through the associations’ continuous collaboration with Israeli groups accused of enabling international crimes, like the IMA. “While Palestinian health workers are killed, tortured, and forced to operate under siege, the IMA, and much of the Israeli medical community, has remained silent, failing to condemn attacks on healthcare or hold its members accountable for violations of medical ethics,” the People’s Health Movement (PHM) wrote. “This silence, in the face of systematic destruction and dehumanization, destroys the integrity of the medical profession and enables further attacks on health workers.”

And while the IMA does obviously not meet any requirements for “medical neutrality,” pro-Israel health organizations seem to have no problem collaborating with them. If medical associations are to retain claims to ethical and academic integrity, they must resist pressure exercised by these groups and uphold the right of health workers to speak on the basis of medical professional values and humanitarian law. If they call out and fight back against intimidation attempts, Dr. Hitti says, they are likely to find overwhelming support among their members.

People’s Health Dispatch is a fortnightly bulletin published by the People’s Health Movement and Peoples Dispatch*. For more articles and to subscribe to People’s Health Dispatch, click* here.

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