Suspend the Israeli Medical Association (IMA) from the World Medical Association (WMA)

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Please, remember the paper headlined “The Shame of Israeli Medicine,” published in The New York Review of Books (May 31, 2025):
"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".

Uphold Medical Ethics; 

Suspend the Israeli Medical Association from the World Medical Association

From 7–10 October 2026, the World Medical Association (WMA) will hold its General Assembly in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. The main role of the WMA is to establish and promote the highest international standards of medical ethics, professional conduct, and patient care for doctors.

We call on the WMA and its member associations to act now and suspend the Israeli Medical Association (IMA), because the IMA has failed to uphold core medical ethical standards, including the WMA Declarations of Geneva and Tokyo.  The IMA is also complicit in serious violations of medical neutrality and human rights, committed by the Israeli military and government.  This situation has been going on for decades and the WMA has failed to date, to act on these fundamentally important issues.  This Assembly is a critical moment for the international medical community to act.

• Attacks on healthcare in Palestine by Israeli forces. Palestinian,  Lebanese and Iranian  hospitals continue to be destroyed, ambulances targeted, and healthcare workers killed, detained, tortured and obstructed from delivering care.

• Ongoing blocking of medical and humanitarian aid to Palestine by Israel. Israel restricts the delivery of  medicines, equipment, fuel, and humanitarian personnel, preventing access to essential care.

• Complicity of Israeli medical professionals in torture and inhumane treatment of Palestinians within the Israeli prison system. Credible reports of this going back three decades indicate that abuse in detention settings has not been properly documented, investigated, or opposed by the IMA, which is  in violation of fundamental medical ethics.

• Systemic inequality in health and access to care affecting Palestinians under illegal occupation and apartheid policies enforced by Israel. Palestinians face significantly worse health outcomes, and are provided with worse health services than Israelis, due to structural restrictions caused by the Israeli illegal occupation and its apartheid policies.  The IMA has never challenged these inequalities.

• Genocide in Palestine.  The ICJ has stated that Israel is conducting a plausible genocide in Gaza, a view endorsed by the UN and countless human rights organisations including Israeli ones.  The IMA has done nothing to oppose the killing and injuring of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza or the destruction of the health service there.  On the contrary, by endorsing the call by 80 Israeli doctors who publicly called for the bombing of Gaza’s hospitals in November 2023, the IMA effectively gave the green light for the genocide. 

• The Palestinian people have asked for our solidarity:  they have called for a boycott and international isolation of all complicit Israeli institutions and organisations, just as happened during apartheid in South Africa in the 1980’s.  We have a duty to listen to them. 

We call on the member national medical associations of the WMA to:

• Cut your institutional ties with the Israeli Medical Association, in line with the decision of the South African Medical Association and British Medical Association 

• Advocate within the WMA for the suspension of the IMA for its multiple violations of medical ethics and international humanitarian law, including its failure to speak out against the genocide in Palestine, the destruction of healthcare infrastructure and the torture and killing of healthcare workers, 

• If WMA leadership fails to take meaningful action and prevents debate at the Rotterdam conference about this issue, we ask you to consider boycotting the WMA and withholding your membership fees to the WMA from 2027, until it does take action.

We call on the World Medical Association to:

• Suspend the Israeli Medical Association (IMA), until it publicly upholds medical ethics and humanitarian law, condemns murder and torture of Palestinian health workers and takes action against violations by its members, as set out in your Porto resolution of 13 October 2025.

• Ensure accountability within the global medical profession: undertake  investigations of breaches of ethics and humanitarian law by national medical associations, and enforce disciplinary measures.  

Medical ethics are the foundation of trust in healthcare. The international medical community has acted before, including during apartheid in South Africa.  If medical ethics are to mean anything in the future, and we are to have confidence that the WMA can fulfil its role as the international guardian of medical ethics, then it must take concerted action to hold the IMA to account  in Rotterdam this October. 

Silence is not neutral. Inaction has consequences.  As Archbishop Desmond Tutu famously said “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”

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