New York City’s Mount Sinai Hospital fired a physician earlier this month for allegedly celebrating Hamas terrorists, and, in a separate case, a hospital in Portland, Ore., fired a nurse for similar reasons.
The incidents are among several cases since Oct. 7, 2023, involving anti-Israel vitriol expressed by health professionals, including two nurses in Sydney, Australia, who are standing trial for telling an Israeli in February that they would not treat him but would instead kill him. These cases have raised concerns that Jews and Israelis face discrimination in their health systems.
Dr. Lila Abassi, an assistant professor of medicine at the hospital in Manhattan’s East Harlem neighborhood, was fired from her teaching position after pro-Hamas posts that she made on social networks were brought to her bosses’ attention, the New York Post reported on Saturday.
She reportedly called Hamas terrorists “noble resistance and freedom fighters.” A Mount Sinai spokesperson told the Post that she had been let go.
The nurse from Portland, Camesha Hart, shared a photo on Instagram of Israeli troops and the comment, “May they all meet their ancestors soon!” In arguments with pro-Israel users, she called them vermin and said she wouldn’t treat them if they needed her medical services.
“I would refuse to treat you. I don’t take care of animals. Dogs. Rats. Vermin of any kind,” she wrote.
Oregon Health and Science University Hospital sources last week told the news site Medium that Hart had been fired.
Abassi, 46, allegedly wrote, “Long Live Hamas & Hezbollah,” called the Israel Defense Forces a “plague,” accused Israel of “slaughtering babies,” and questioned the veracity of well-documented cases of rape during the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas terrorists in Israel, in which they murdered some 1,200 Israelis and abducted another 251.
“No longer will any Jewish patient feel confident that they will receive safe care from that individual, and by extension, at the facility that employs them,” the founders of the watchdog Physicians Against Antisemitism, which exposed Abassi’s posts, wrote in a statement last week.
Regarding the rape of women by Hamas members on Oct. 7, Abassi wrote: “Please show me actual rape video.” She wrote this in a Facebook doctors group, using the pseudonym “Kluver Bucy,” the name for a rare brain disorder that affects memory and behavior, the Post reported.
City Councilwoman Inna Vernikov (R-Brooklyn) had pressed Mount Sinai for weeks to take action regarding the physician, according to the report.
“Our most basic expectation of doctors is that they will perform their duties in an unbiased manner—especially a doctor serving a city as ethnically and religiously diverse as ours,” Vernikov told the Post.
“How scary is the thought that this woman was entrusted with the lives of Jewish patients while expressing blatant support for the same terrorists that seek to eliminate the Jewish people and destroy America.”
