‘End the genocide’: hundreds of US Jewish health professionals call for end of Gaza war

Palestinians from Gaza City move southwards with their belongings on the coastal road, 19 September 2025

Etan Nechin reports in Haaretz on21 September 2025:

New York– More than 400 US Jewish health professionals and public health leaders signed an open letter on Friday calling to “end the genocide in Gaza” and urging medical institutions to contribute to the Strip’s restoration and help rebuild its shattered health system.

“As health professionals, we are bound by ethical principles that transcend politics and borders, including the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm, the obligation to safeguard life and dignity without discrimination, and to resist and denounce genocide,” the letter said.

The signatories, spanning clinicians, medical educators, health policy experts and ethicists from leading institutions in the United States, Israel and Britain, say their professional and moral obligations compel them to speak against what they describe as a deliberate campaign to destroy civilian life in Gaza.

“Too many of our colleagues and institutions have yet to dissent while an entire population, half of them children, has been starved, bombed, denied care, and displaced. To be silent is to be complicit.”The appeal begins by acknowledging “the horrific Hamas-led attack on October 7, 2023,” but says Israel’s response has amounted to a campaign of destruction that cannot be justified.

The letter stressed that “these are not mishaps of war” but rather “the foreseeable and intentional outcomes of a military strategy that targets civilians and life-sustaining systems.”

Among the signatories are prominent physician-scientists, including David Schwartz of the University of Colorado, Dean Sheppard of the University of California, San Francisco, Marc Peters-Golden of Michigan Medical School, Jacob Sznajder of Northwestern and Naftali Kaminski of Yale.

They also include national leaders in health policy, such as Donald Berwick, former head of Medicare and Medicaid and founder of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, Gordon Schiff of Harvard University, A. David Paltiel of Yale University and David Himmelstein, a leading researcher on health economics and reform.

“About a week after [the] October 7 [attack] I signed an email from professors expressing horror at Hamas’s atrocities and asking Israel to avoid unnecessary harm to civilians and noncombatants,” Kaminski told Haaretz.  “At the time some of my friends attacked me for suggesting the letter implied Israel might harm innocent people,” he added. Now, he claims that it is clear that “inflicting as much harm as possible on Palestinians and destroying Gaza is the aim of the war.”  Kaminski now asks if there is “any other way to explain the systematic destruction of Gaza’s health system,” adding, “how does this help free the hostages or secure the safety of Israeli civilians?”

One of the authors, Dr. Jacob Sznajder, stressed that, “as a son of Holocaust survivors,” he sees it as his “duty to reject the killings of children and civilians and the deliberate destruction of Gaza.”

Since the war began, the letter says at least 64,656 Palestinians have been killed and 163,503 wounded as of September 10, 2025, with women, children, and the elderly comprising the majority. Civilians comprise 83 percent of the dead.

More than 700 attacks on health facilities have left over 94 percent of Gaza’s hospitals destroyed or damaged, making basic care nearly impossible. Gaza, the letter says, now has the highest per capita number of child amputees in the world.

Dr. Mical Raz an Israeli-American health policy researcher said she believes it is “time for Jewish physicians to make their voices heard,” in spite of the “risk of being labeled antisemitic.” She says that “even conducting medical grand rounds or holding conferences on the medical and humanitarian crisis has become politicized.”

The letter also notes that the systematic destruction of infrastructure, the detention and killing of health and aid workers and the broader blockade has plunged the territory into famine, with one third of the population suffering catastrophic hunger. Life expectancy in Gaza has been reduced to nearly half of what it was before October 2023.

Dr. Roni Tamari, a New York-based oncologist, explained, “‘Why did the world remain silent?’ was always a question when I grew up in Israel,” adding, “Never could I imagine that this question would become so relevant and would hit so close to home.  I can’t remain silent amid the horrors carried out in Gaza by the Israeli government, and essentially in my name,” she said.

In addressing the debate over the word genocide, Kaminski told Haaretz his Israeli and American friends “agreed with every word in the letter, except for the use of the term ‘genocide’.”   Kaminski says one “cannot treat a disease without diagnosing it.”  “In this case, the diagnosis is clear. Experts – Amos Goldberg, Omer Bartov, human rights organizations and researchers – have already made it. And as long as we shy away from speaking to the patient and their family about the illness, we cannot treat it,” he said.

The letter calls on professionals to elevate Palestinian testimony and urge colleagues to resist what they describe as the misuse of antisemitism accusations to muffle criticism and solidarity.

They also urge medical centers and institutions to contribute to the restoration of Gaza by donating medical supplies, training clinicians, creating volunteer options and providing advanced care both remotely and on the ground.  ⁠”The Jewish High Holidays call upon us to set out on the four Maimonidean levels of penance: Desisting from destructive deeds, confession and resolution for the future…and that we no longer will participate in the suffering we cause to another people,” the letter says.

This article is reproduced in its entirety