1,150 health professionals, organizations launch petition to boycott Israeli medical association over Gaza genocide

More than 1,150 health professionals and medical organizations have signed a petition demanding a boycott of the Israeli Medical Association (IMA), saying it is directly complicit in the ongoing genocide against Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip.

The signatories are urging the World Medical Association (WMA) to expel the IMA over its complete silence on Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza’s health infrastructure, as well as the killing, abduction, and torture of Palestinian doctors, nurses, and first responders.

Led by the People’s Health Movement (PHM), Doctors for Gaza, and the Health Advisory Council of Jewish Voice for Peace, the petition also calls for the WMA to suspend the Israeli body for its blatant failure to uphold core medical ethical standards.

Among the hundreds of signatories are Spain’s Health Workers for Palestine, the US-based Doctors Against Genocide, and the Health Alliance for Democracy in the Philippines.

The petition, recently published in The Lancet, the world’s leading medical journal, states that the IMA has violated medical ethics and international humanitarian law in the besieged strip.

The Lancet noted that it could not find any public statements from the IMA condemning Israeli attacks on Gaza’s health system, criticizing the regime’s conduct in the war, calling for a ceasefire, or responding to UN reports documenting genocide against the Palestinian people.

Instead, the IMA has repeatedly echoed Israeli regime talking points, including the unsubstantiated claim that the Hamas resistance movement uses hospitals as command centers.

In recent months, there has been a growing international campaign to suspend Israel from the WMA and boycott Israeli doctors and medical institutions.

A report by the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor in April 2026 highlighted the IMA’s failure to condemn the Israeli military’s repeated attacks on Gaza’s hospitals.

The report stated: “This incitement was supported by institutional cover from the IMA, which not only failed to condemn the targeting of the health system but also lobbied to block international ceasefire calls, prioritizing military alignment over its humanitarian duty to protect life.”

In mid-June, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the largest Muslim civil rights organization in the United States, welcomed international medical groups’ calls for Israel’s suspension from the WMA.

In late 2023, a group of Israeli doctors, including dozens of practicing physicians, published an open letter explicitly calling for the bombardment of Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital, describing the territory’s health infrastructure as a “legitimate target.”

The IMA took no disciplinary action against them.

Al-Shifa Hospital was among dozens of medical facilities in Gaza that were repeatedly bombed and raided by Israeli forces. Scores of hospitals and health centers were destroyed or rendered inoperable.

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In December 2024, Israeli troops stormed Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza.

According to Euro-Med Monitor, medical staff and displaced civilians sheltering there were executed during the raid.

The hospital director, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, was abducted and remains in Israeli custody, where he is subjected to severe mistreatment and torture.

The Israeli genocide in Gaza has effectively annihilated the Strip’s entire medical system. Airstrikes combined with a criminal blockade have pushed remaining hospitals to the brink of total collapse, leaving critically injured patients without adequate care.

With severe shortages of medicine, equipment, and fuel, doctors in Gaza warn that many more lives will be lost as the Zionist regime’s siege continues to strangle the healthcare system.

The systematic targeting of civilian infrastructure, medical facilities, and densely populated areas by the Israeli occupation has been widely documented as constituting genocide.

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