Across the UK and around the world, the tide has turned. From musicians chanting at Glastonbury, to students occupying campuses, to doctors’ unions passing motions of solidarity, public opinion has shifted. People are demanding an end to active participation in genocide and ethnic cleansing.
The votes two weeks ago at the British Medical Association’s annual representative meeting – the largest gathering of doctors in the UK – are a powerful symbol of that shift.
I am a senior National Health Service (NHS) anaesthetist. I work in operating theatres, where the stakes are high and the duty clear: do no harm, save lives where you can, ease pain where you cannot.
Like most health workers, I hold dear the belief that every human life holds equal worth, and that providing dignified care should never be conditional – not on race, nationality or politics.
But in Palestine, the very foundations of our profession are being destroyed with impunity.
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For the past 21 months, we have witnessed a brutal and unrelenting war on healthcare. More than 1,400 Palestinian health workers have been targeted and killed – nurses, paramedics, midwives and doctors. Hospitals have been reduced to rubble; ambulances bombed, blockaded and buried in sand. Patients have died of treatable wounds, because Israel blocks basic supplies from entering the territory.
Doctors have been arrested, disappeared, tortured – often in the very hospitals they refused to abandon. Despite these egregious war crimes, the Israeli medical establishment has not only refused to condemn these attacks, but in instances dating back decades, it has been complicit in the maltreatment of arbitrarily detained people, thus failing to uphold our profession’s basic ethical principles.
Moral failure
This is not the tragic collateral damage of war. This is a systematic assault aimed at undermining the healthcare system and maximising harm against the Palestinian people. It is about dismantling a health system that trained its own specialists and served a population under blockade with extraordinary resilience.
All the while, western governments – including our own – have not just looked away, but actively sponsored this state terrorism. It is carried out by a state that has, by its own admission, used torture “systematically” against Palestinians.
The UK government continues to license arms sales to Israel. It refuses to support international investigations into war crimes, providing the Israeli state with diplomatic impunity. It has outsourced NHS patient data to Palantir, a surveillance company with deep ties to the Israeli military and its apartheid infrastructure. And it has failed to protect British health workers and students who speak up.
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Faced with such moral failure, health workers across the country are now speaking with one voice.
Two weeks ago, at the BMA policy-setting conference, a series of landmark motions were passed, calling for the suspension of engagement with the Israeli Medical Association; the cancellation of Palantir’s NHS contract; condemnation of the destruction of healthcare services and the killing of healthcare workers in Gaza; and the immediate release of arbitrarily detained healthcare workers.
The principles of medical ethics – neutrality, dignity, human rights – are not abstract. They must be lived
The motions also called for the protection of UK medics and students, the revocation of punitive measures against those targeted for speaking out, and full support for the International Court of Justice’s genocide investigations, including accountability for Israeli doctors complicit in torture and abuse.
These motions were brought by grassroots members and Health Workers 4 Palestine, doctors working in overstretched emergency departments and underfunded general practices. All passed with overwhelming majorities.
This moment didn’t start in October 2023. It is part of three-quarters of a century of occupation, apartheid and dehumanisation. It’s why I carry with me the memory of Razan al-Najjar, the 21-year-old volunteer medic shot dead by an Israeli sniper in 2018 while treating the wounded during the Great March of Return. Najjar was wearing her white coat. Her hands were raised. Her only crime was trying to save lives.
Her killing sent a clear and sinister message: even those who heal are not safe if they are Palestinian. We’ve seen this message repeated again and again, as Israel has targeted hospitals, maternity wards and dialysis units.
A test of values
But that message is no longer going unchallenged.
The BMA vote shows that the medical profession is no longer willing to turn a blind eye; that we recognise our duty does not end at the bedside. It extends to standing up for the sanctity of healthcare everywhere.
This is also a test of our profession’s values. The principles of medical ethics – neutrality, dignity, human rights – are not abstract. They must be lived. And right now, they are being desecrated in Palestine.
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It is not enough to mourn the loss of Palestinian medics. We must demand justice for them. We must name the system and state that killed them. And we must refuse to collaborate with institutions that excuse or enable that system.
For many of us, this is also personal. As a British Iranian woman, I know what it means to be told that the lives of your loved ones matter less. I have witnessed language being used to justify violence, and institutions being complicit in sustaining it. That’s why this moment feels so urgent, and so clear.
We cannot claim to uphold anti-racism in the NHS while remaining silent about a live-streamed genocide. We will not allow our own government to hide behind procedure while our colleagues are buried in mass graves.
Where governments will not act, the people will.
That is the lesson of the BMA vote. Ordinary people – in our unions, our workplaces, our streets – still have the power to say, clearly and collectively: not in our name. We will not let our profession be complicit in crimes against humanity.
The end of impunity begins with the choices we make. The doctors who voted chose justice. They chose solidarity. They chose resistance.
And now, the rest of us must follow.
Dr Omar Abdel-Mannan contributed to this column.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
