September 22, 2025
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Streeting suspends NHS doctor for social media posts on Gaza

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16 May 2025

The Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, insists upon applying the IHRA definition to NHS personnel. As the Electronic Intifada reports, this has led to the suspension of a UK doctor merely for telling the truth about Israel’s deadly assault on Gaza in his social media posts. Can the Labour government possibly sink further into a moral abyss?

UK doctor suspended over Gaza posts

Nora Barrows-Friedman The Electronic Intifada Podcast 14 May 2025

For nearly 19 months, Israel, with financial, technological and political support from the US and Europe, has attacked every single hospital in Gaza.

The Israeli military has destroyed every aspect of Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure; executed paramedics and threw them into mass graves; and hunted, threatened, kidnapped, tortured and killed medical workers, skilled physicians and hospital directors.

And since 2 March, Israel has prevented all medications, medical supplies, food, fuel and basic essentials from entering Gaza, plunging two million people, half of them children, into a deepening catastrophe.

However, if you are a doctor in the UK, and you express outrage about the genocide, you might lose your job with the National Health Service (NHS) and be accused of anti-Semitism.

“As doctors, our morality and our moral standing has always been held against us,” Dr. Nadeem Haddadin-Crowe tells The Electronic Intifada Podcast.

“If you are a doctor, you must act in this certain way, and if you don’t, in fact, if you pretend to be human, and you leave work and you have opinions on the world and politics and society, when you add those two things together, you’ve got a recipe for disaster.”

Haddadin-Crowe is a British-Jordanian doctor specializing in emergency medicine and previously worked as a contracted (“bank”) worker in an NHS hospital, but was suspended due to his social media posts about Gaza.

He is currently fundraising for his legal case over his employment, as well as to clarify employment rights for NHS contract workers in England and advocate for the right to speak out against war crimes.

Haddadin-Crowe explains that hospital administrators accused him of anti-Semitism based on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition, which has primarily been weaponized to smear and censor supporters of Palestinian rights.

The definition comes with 11 illustrative “examples” of anti-Semitism, the majority of which address criticism of Israel and its official state ideology, Zionism.

In December 2024, UK Health Secretary Wes Streeting called on regulators to root out healthcare professionals who criticize Israel’s genocide in Gaza, joining various anti-Palestinian political groups in the UK – such as UK Lawyers for Israel – who have been feeding information to the government in order to target specific doctors over their criticism of Israel.

Streeting and these Israel lobby groups, Haddadin-Crowe says, “have made these sweeping accusations against people like me who have dared to say, or have the courage to say, that what’s going on in Palestine against the Palestinians doesn’t reflect humanity.”

His court case is scheduled for June 2026 – more than a year in the future.

But he says it allows him time to keep advocating for the rights of physicians to express themselves and advocate for their Palestinian colleagues in Gaza.

“This gives me a year to keep telling this story. This gives me a year to keep raising money to have the strongest fight in court that I can have, so that we can have a legal basis for everything that comes up against people [in] the future,” he explains.

“I need answers on behalf of myself, and I need answers on behalf of everybody else that I know [who] has gone through this. … People have suffered at the hands of the same people, the same people that have been involved with similar hospital trusts, similar groups.”

Haddadin-Crowe says that he is engaging in this fight because he knows it’s the right thing to do.

“As medics, we’re supposed to be the moral standard of care and caring. And the NHS and the world has shown me that if you don’t stick to your own moral compass, don’t rely on any governments or any organizations,” he notes.

Produced by Tamara Nassar

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