Medical workers too are truth-tellers

ON SUNDAY 2 November London Freelance Branch held a symposium in partnership with King’s College London’s University College Union branch to mark the annual UNESCO day calling for an end to impunity for crimes against journalists. For an overview of the event see here.

Moosa Qureshi introduced himself as an NHS doctor.

Dr. Moosa Qureshi holds up the name of a journalist killed in Gaza at the close of the event on 2 November

Image © Pennie Quinton

I’VE BEEN involved in lots of political and legal campaigns. If we can get a journalist to listen to us and cover our story, we're like “we've made it!” You guys for us are really powerful and it's quite heartbreaking to understand and realise today how vulnerable you are.

You as journalists understand the importance of definitions, I think, and narrative.

I want to highlight one thing from that letter [from the UK government]. I have to be really careful what I say here. The military wing of Hamas was proscribed in 2001. In 2021, the British government proscribed the entirety of Hamas. They then stated that the distinction between the parts of Hamas was artificial, that the entire organisation was involved in terrorism.

Just think about the implications of that. Hamas runs the health industry. It runs the hospitals in Gaza. And that has allowed Israel, according to our government's own definition, to say that doctors, nurses, who work in these hospitals are part of a terrorist infrastructure.

It has also allowed them to say that journalists are part of Hamas. So the logic is that everybody who opposes Israel is part of Hamas, and the logic of Israel is that everybody who is part of Hamas is a target.

Something very similar is actually happening in this country. We have pillars of the community, NHS workers who have given decades of service to preserve life, being accused by the British government and “converted” into supporters of terrorism. For me, that's a legal perversity.

A recent report from the Palestine Centre for Human Rights, to which John McDonnell has referred, documents 221 journalists killed from October 2023 to May 2025 and 415 injured. Gaza is now the deadliest place on earth for journalists. These aren't abstractions, these are human beings, wearing clearly-marked press vests, carrying cameras, doing their jobs. They've been killed by snipers while wearing press vests. They've been bombed with their vehicles, clearly marked as press vehicles.

In the worst cases their homes have been bombed, with their entire families killed alongside them. But it doesn't stop them. And Israel bars international journalists from entering, to control the narrative by eliminating anyone who can contradict them.

This [slide] is Ismail Al Ghoul, one of the many prominent journalists killed by Israel. This is his wife and his two-year-old daughter. Ismail was killed by an Israeli drone which decapitated him while he was wearing his press vest. Shortly before his death, he wrote to a journalist colleague: “let me tell you, my friend, that I no longer know the taste of sleep. The bodies of children and the screams of the injured and their blood-soaked images never leave my sight. The cries of mothers and the wailing of men who are missing their loved ones never fade from my ears. I can no longer bear the sound of children's voices from beneath the rock. It is no longer easy for me to stand before the rows of coffins, which are locked and extended, or to see the dead people more than the living, who are fighting death beneath their homes, not finding a way out to safety and survival. I am tired.”

This isn't warfare. This is deliberate silencing of truth. When you kill witnesses, destroy cameras, and seal the borders to journalists, you're not fighting terrorism: you're hiding the genocide.

I am part of Health Workers 4 Palestine, so a lot of the work we do is about some parallel processes that happen to health workers.

A United Nations report from September 2024 documents over 500 health workers killed by Israel. It's more like 1500 [now]. This is not by accident. This is not “collateral damage”. This has been exhaustively investigated by the United Nations, and they've documented that this is systematic. The medical personnel have been intentionally targeted.

I have already spoken about the importance of definitions, and how the definition of Hamas is used by Israel as a justification for murdering innocent people. These aren't theoretical abstractions. Just as we've heard of journalists being murdered for allegedly being members of Hamas, Israel has repeatedly used this logic to label Palestinian health workers, including, for instance, Dr. Hussam Abu Safia, as Hamas operatives.

Anybody who stands against Israel's colonialist project “is Hamas”, and anybody who is Hamas is a target. This [slide] was Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh, the head of orthopaedics at al-Shifa hospital. Those are two young children bleeding on the floor. Dr. Al-Bursh is attempting to ventilate one by hand.

I very much doubt those children survived. He was a director of orthopaedics before the hospital was destroyed. He moved on to the Indonesian Hospital. Then he moved on to Al-Awda hospital. He was absolutely committed to preserving life in Gaza. He was forced to leave Al-Awda hospital because Israeli forces threatened to destroy the hospital unless all male workers left.

Dr. Al-Bursh was detained in December 2023, processed at a notorious detention place, a torture place, and transferred to Ofer Prison, where he died in April 2024. Witnesses told Sky News that he appeared badly beaten, and a legal deposition describes Dr. Al-Bursh being brought into Ofer Prison, naked from the waist down, thrown into the yard, unable to stand, and found dead [soon after].

This is a systematic elimination of Gaza's medical capacity.

When you kill doctors, arrest surgeons and destroy hospitals, you're ensuring the wounded have nowhere to go, the sick cannot be treated, and entire families are going to die from preventable conditions. The UN commission's conclusion was unambiguous: Israel has implemented a concerted policy to destroy Gaza's healthcare system. These are war crimes, and these are crimes against humanity .

We all know that foreign journalists are barred from Gaza, so who are the truth-tellers? The only people allowed to enter Gaza are health workers from MSF [Médecins Sans Frontières].

These health workers, people such as Ghassan Abu Sittah, Nick Maynard, Khaled Dawas, Victoria Rose, are top-of-their-class surgeons. They are some of the best surgeons in this country. When they come out [from Gaza], they face a stark choice: to continue to deliver life-saving surgery, to go back in, or to speak out.

This [slide] is Nick Maynard, I know him well. He's attended many conferences with Tayab Ali to speak out about Gaza. He wrestled with this choice for a long time. He has been working in Palestine for many, many years. He has many close friends there. And he knew that Israel would stop him returning to Gaza if he spoke out. But he did speak out. He spoke to the Prime Minister, to the Foreign Secretary, he's spoken out at the United Nations, he's spoken to United States senators in one-to-one meetings, and he's spoken to senior administration officials in the White House.

He has decided that pens are more powerful than scalpels.

This is Ghassan Abu Sittah. He is one of the world's leading experts on traumatic war injuries. The reason he's such an amazing expert is because he spent a lot of his time living in countries next to Israel. He served in Gaza for six weeks from October 2023. He's another eminent surgeon who decided to act as a truth-teller, but the response to his truth has been shocking. He was arrested - illegally, it turned out - for telling the truth in Germany.

And in the UK he's been referred to the medical regulator in an attempt to destroy his career.

Is anybody in the GMC or any of other medical group supporting people? Or are they just allowing this process to go through? I think the GMC is obliged to investigate anybody who's reported to them.

We at Health Workers 4 Palestine believe that there's been a decision at the highest political levels to target health workers who speak out in Palestine. We think that's because politicians know that in general the British public trust health workers more than they trust politicians.

So we think that there's a concerted campaign to shut down the voices of NHS health workers and we as an organisation decided to fight back.

I'm going to tell you briefly about some legal campaigns that I have been involved in setting up, and which we tried to get the press and the media to cover – with varying degrees of success.

Dr. Nadeem Crowe was an emergency doctor at the Royal Free Hospital. He was suspended in the middle of his shift in A&E [the Accident and Emergency department] and told to go home. He asked himself whether he might have killed a patient or done something really dangerous. It turned out that he had tweeted some potentially upsetting posts about Gaza.

The Trust [hospital management] refused to show him what he had tweeted. And when he tried to take them to Employment Tribunal, the Trust tried to sidestep basic protections for him because he was a “bank worker” [technically freelance], even though he had been a bank worker at a very prestigious London hospital for over seven years and was a leading member of the team.

Fatima Khamir is a midwife and a former cultural safety lead at another very prestigious London hospital. It was literally her job to stand up against racism. After speaking about Palestine at various meetings, NHS meetings, and also because of her social media activities, she was referred to the Nursing and Midwifery Council, which is the equivalent of the GMC for midwives. It said that she was exercising her freedom of speech, and she had said nothing that caused any risk to patients.

She was then referred again, and finally she was referred to Prevent [“a Home Office programme that protects vulnerable people from being exploited by extremists”]. She got a phone call from the counter-terrorism police, who thankfully also agreed that she'd done nothing wrong. But this is the level of censorship that health workers are facing. The complaints from this hospital are all motivated by a notorious pro-Israeli organisation.

This [slide] is a British Palestinian senior nurse called Ahmed Baker, who is here. Ahmed is a very, very senior nurse. He has regular contact with the executive board of his trust, another major NHS trust. A very senior executive in his NHS trust told him that a watermelon in his [Teams online meeting] background – an image of lots of fruit with a watermelon – was potentially antisemitic, and a breach of the Trust uniform policy, and he had better remove that watermelon, or else.

So we have reached the absurdity of antisemitic fruit. Senior NHS executives are trivialising genuine antisemitism. Antisemitism is a serious problem. When you start talking about antisemitic fruit, then you are trivialising the actual reality of what you're trying to deal with – and furthermore are literally wiping out Palestinian identity from the workforce in order to satisfy the pro-Israel lobby. And we know in this case, because it's been published, that UKLFI [UK Lawyers for Israel] actually announced that the NHS Trust is going to change its uniform policy before the Trust could inform its own workers.

© Moosa Qureshi

Edit © Pennie Quinton

• Moosa Qureshi outlined for those present a case that medics will be announcing soon, which the Freelance intends to cover when the time is ripe.

No to impunity our seminar to mark the UNESCO day