Loyalty tests, silencing, persecution, faced by Arab healthcare workers in Israel since Oct. 7
Sharon Hospital in the central Israeli city of Petah Tikva.
Ido Efrati reports in Haaretz on 29 April 2026:
Around 200,000 of Israel’s 2.1 million Arab citizens of Israel work in the country’s health care system, where their contribution is incalculable. About one-quarter of Israel’s physicians, dentists and nurses are Arab, as are around half of the country’s pharmacists. But claims of a culture of coexistence to the country, a recent study by Physicians for Human Rights – Israel reveals a different picture: Since the October 7, 2023 massacre carried out by Hamas and other Palestinian militants from Gaza in southern Israel, the system is engaged in persistent silencing and persecution, with some Arab staff members forced to conceal their identity in order to keep their jobs.
The report is based on 32 in-depth interviews with Arab and Jewish health care personnel (21 physicians, eight nurses and three paramedical workers), a survey of 310 health care professionals conducted in the summer of 2025 and case reports submitted to Physicians for Human Rights – Israel in response to Freedom of Information requests to Israel’s 11 government hospitals and four health maintenance organizations.
One of the cases in the report was that of Dr. Abed Samara, a respected, long-time physician and director of the cardiac intensive care unit at Hasharon Hospital, part of Petah Tikva’s Rabin Medical Center. On October 18, 2023 he was suspended and called out as a supporter of terror after a colleague misinterpreted an old profile picture from 2022 featuring a green flag and the Shahada, the Muslim declaration of faith, as an expression of support for Hamas. The story snowballed: Without any clarification with him the hospital administration hastened to send him a letter of suspension and even to turn to the police.
Samara had worked in the hospital for 15 years, and held a senior and medically crucial position, but that made no difference. Then-Health Minister Uriel Busso also hastened to react: “An employee in Hasharon Hospital used Hamas flags in his profile and wrote words of support for the terror organization that massacred and murdered hundreds of Jews in cold blood,” he claimed at the time on X, without any basis.
“The employee was removed from the hospital and a complaint was submitted to the police. We will continue to act with zero tolerance for supporters of terror in the health care system.” Although the file against him was closed, Samara has yet to return to the public system.
This case is only the tip of the iceberg. The report reveals dozens of hearings and clarification talks that took place in 15 hospitals and in all the health maintenance organizations. For example, in the first weeks of the war steps were taken against a nurse from Soroka Medical Center in Be’er Sheva, and he was suspended after members of his staff complained that he had denied the Hamas massacre.
The nurse explained that he said that he hadn’t seen video clips showing the beheading of children. After the suspension he was transferred to a different job. Disciplinary action was also taken against a doctor at the Meuhedet Health Services HMO in Jerusalem, and he was fired after he said to a patient that “There are casualties on the other side too.”
In November 2023 a nurse at Wolfson Medical Center in Holon was fired after sharing a picture of dead children in Gaza bearing the caption “The IDF bank of targets.” A nurse at the Galilee Medical Center in Nahariya, who worked there for 20 years, was suspended for three weeks after a colleague claimed that she had “praised” Hamas in a private conversation. She vehemently denied it. “I said that I have no problem with them eliminating crime organizations, as long as they don’t kill little children.” When she was returned to work in another department she encountered a cold shoulder from her colleagues.
A housekeeping worker from Meir Medical Center in Kfar Sava was summoned for questioning after the posting on social media of part of a video in which he allegedly cursed Jews. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir posted a picture of the worker in handcuffs, with the Israeli flag behind him, as he did in other instances, and wrote: “All due respect to our police who got to the terror supporter and racist within a few hours. Zero tolerance for anyone who identifies with the Nazis.”
Although the wave of hearings gradually died down, according to the report, it had a chilling effect and its influence filtered down. Arab workers reported that they check which posts they “liked” on social media in the past decade, and carefully weigh any statement in WhatsApp groups related to their work. They say that when they’re at work they have to pay attention to the apps and the news pages they open on their phones, and to maintain silence when their Jewish colleagues discuss political issues.
The loyalty trap
The report describes a situation in which hospitals have turned into a battlefield of “loyalty tests” and interpersonal fractures. Many of the hearings began with complaints by Jewish staff members, some of whom actively burrowed into the social media of their Arab colleagues. “You’re in a perpetual trap. You constantly need to prove yourself,” the report quotes one interviewee as saying. “The need to be seen as a ‘good Arab’ … recurred throughout the interviews,” the report states. One reported “always being stared at intensely, even during staff meetings,” while another likened colleagues’ treatment of them to a Shin Bet security service investigation. Several of the workers testified that Jewish colleagues told them: “Arabs should be grateful just to be allowed to be here.” A Jewish doctor told the authors of the report that female workers even called an Arab colleague a “terrorist.”
At the same time, the system demanded “exonerating activities” from the Arab workers. One interviewee told of a director who actually demanded that the Arab nurses hang Israeli flags in the department, and another told about the demand that they stand at ceremonies and hold pictures of hostages to prove loyalty. Several interviewees said that they faced dilemmas when they were required to wear pins with [Israeli] flags, or were sent in staff groups to make requests for donations, gifts or assistance to soldiers or their wives. One of them said that a colleague told him in tears that she was asked to hold a sign “Together we will win” and have her picture taken, right after she received a message that her aunt in Gaza had been killed.
A central chapter in the report was devoted to the stubborn battle of Physicians for Human Rights to receive official data from the institutions. The attempt to get a full picture about the wave of hearings, according to the report, encountered evasion and concealment, and the medical institutions weren’t happy to reveal the statistics of their disciplinary hearings. The organization submitted appeals to the court against several institutions, including the Clalit, Maccabi and Leumit HMOs and Wolfson and Sheba medical centers.
According to the report, even in the data received from the institutions that did send figures, there was a spike in the number of Arab workers who were subject to disciplinary proceedings after October 2023. In the Galilee Medical Center, the percentage jumped from 34 percent to 59 percent. In Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon, it jumped from 2.4 percent to 27 percent.
The replies provided by the institutions to Physicians for Human Rights were sometimes partial and misleading. Clalit sent information only after an appeal was submitted, and even then, it looked incomplete. A senior employee in the organization’s northern district, who saw the official report claiming that there were no hearings referring to comments made by Arab workers, told the authors of the report: “I personally am familiar with more than 10; they only gave you what reached the media.” Ziv Medical Center in Safed reported that no hearings were conducted there in the wake of employee marks, but a physician at the hospital said that even so, “there are many ways to intimidate and humiliate Arabs.”
In the correspondence revealed in the report, representatives of the institutions continued to entrench themselves behind the coexistence slogans. A representative of Shamir Medical Center (Assaf Harofeh) wrote that the hospital “is characterized by a commitment to coexistence. … we work alongside one another, eat together, and laugh together.” But in a subsequent email, the hospital provided only partial data about the workers who were subject to a disciplinary hearing, which omitted the employees’ ethnic or national affiliation. The report says that “Information about silencing, it seems, is often silenced as well.”
Double standard
The main source of frustration for the Arab interviewees stems from the selective implementation of the principles of medical ethics and neutrality. At the time when they were silenced, the system was flooded with ultranationalism and militarism; at a time when an Arab doctor was summoned to a hearing over the word “genocide” in a private post, senior Jewish doctors published a letter calling to bomb Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. Other doctors dubbed Palestinians “poison mice” or “future terrorists” without any sanctions from the Israel Medical Association. “One side is allowed to say, ‘We have to kill all of them’ and the other side, which is trying to present a complex picture, is labeled as a terror supporter,” said a Jewish doctor quoted in the report.
Dr. Lina Qasem-Hassan, a general practitioner from northern Israel, a human rights activist and a member of Physicians for Human Rights – Israel, told Haaretz that the Arab workers feel transparent in the hospitals. “Jews and Arabs sitting in the staff room and eating hummus and labneh – that’s not coexistence,” she says. “What actually happens is that you often have to maintain a low profile. In the shared space of the health care system, there’s no room to contain or to be familiar with a different historical narrative. The stories and the hearings since the start of the war have caused people to keep their mouths closed, even when the war intensified and turned into genocide and the murder of children.”
A nurse from northern Israel, who requested anonymity, told Haaretz about the silencing in the health care system. “I no longer share anything on social media,” he said. “I know that there are people who are only waiting for that, so I lowered my profile. But at a certain point, I couldn’t keep quiet any longer in the face of the starvation and death of children. I wrote a short post about that, which says that it’s inhuman for little children to die of hunger, no matter from which religion. In response, I receive a reaction from a nurse I know who works in the neonatal intensive care unit of one of the hospitals: ‘As long as you talk about children who are dying, you’re finished as far as we’re concerned.'”
The author of the report, Dr. Shani Bar-Tuvia, said that it “demonstrates that this isn’t only an unprecedented wave of persecution, but a phenomenon that continues to shape the professional lives of Palestinian workers even now in the Israeli health care system. Dozens of hearings were conducted in dozens of institutions, and workers were repeatedly required to pass loyalty tests and to refrain even from conversations in Arabic. At a time when the senior members of the system present it as a beacon of equality and coexistence, many Palestinian health care workers feel that they have actually been left in the dark. The first step toward equality is to recognize the fact that it simply doesn’t exist.”
This article is reproduced in its entirety