Medical Ethics Collide with Political Activism

A storm has erupted in the international medical community after senior Israeli anesthesiologists publicly rebuked the British Journal of Anaesthesia (BJA) for publishing an article that accused Israel of kidnapping, torturing, and killing healthcare workers in Gaza, a claim entirely unsupported by verifiable evidence.

The outcry from Israel’s top medical experts, including Prof. Idit Matot, head of Anesthesia, Pain, and Intensive Care at Tel Aviv’s Sourasky Medical Center; Prof. Barak Cohen, chairman of the Anesthesiologists Association in the Israeli Medical Association; and Dr. Shai Fein, head of Anesthesiology at Rabin Medical Center, forced the BJA’s editor-in-chief to issue an exceedingly rare public apology for allowing “politically charged content” to appear in a scientific paper.

The “Sentence That Crossed the Red Line”

The offending article, co-authored by Gaza-based physician Dr. Iyad Abukarsh, along with his colleagues in North America, Dr. Abdulrahman Abu Motlaq, Dr. Abdalmajeed Atallah, Dr. Bilal Irfan, Dr. Sameer Khan and Dr. Ahlia Kattan purported to describe how medical teams in Gaza are innovating under duress. But buried within its technical discussion was a single explosive line that shattered its scientific neutrality:

“Such resource scarcity, coupled with the widespread destruction of civilian infrastructure and hospitals, including the abduction, torture, and killing of healthcare workers and trained specialists, has driven the remaining local medical professionals to adapt by developing innovative techniques to ensure patient safety during surgery.”

That one sentence, backed by eight unverifiable “references”, turned a medical study into a political indictment. The Israeli physicians responded swiftly, accusing the BJA of allowing blood libel-level propaganda to masquerade as peer-reviewed research.

Science, or Slander?

In their joint letter, Professors Matot, Cohen, and Fein expressed deep concern over what they called “the infiltration of political rhetoric into medical literature.” While they commended the article’s focus on innovation amid scarcity, they denounced the “unproven accusations of war crimes” that had no place in a medical context.

“We cannot stand idle as science is weaponized,” the letter read. “Sympathy for civilian suffering cannot justify academic malpractice or the erosion of evidence-based standards.”

Their warning carried moral and professional weight, not only as Israeli doctors defending their nation’s integrity, but as leading figures in a global discipline that depends on trust, neutrality, and peer verification.

A Rare Editorial Retraction, and a Mea Culpa

Under mounting pressure, the BJA’s editor-in-chief issued a formal apology acknowledging the breach of scientific ethics:

“We agree with Prof. Cohen and colleagues that journal content should remain restricted to medical and scientific topics relevant to the practice of anaesthesia… We regret the inclusion of politically charged comments in the article.”

The apology, published in the same issue, marked a significant admission that the line between science and activism had been crossed, and that it was Israeli medical professionals who compelled one of Britain’s oldest medical journals to correct course.

Prof. Matot praised the rare apology:

“This was about more than one paper. It was about the integrity of science itself. When journals blur the line between research and ideology, they turn medicine into propaganda.”

Not an Isolated Incident: A Pattern of Politicization

This was not the first time Israeli doctors were forced to defend medical science from political contamination. Earlier this year, Prof. Amit Segev, director of Cardiology at Sheba Medical Center, fired back at the New England Journal of Medicine after it published a letter likening Israeli military operations to atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a grotesque comparison unsupported by evidence or proportionality.

Segev accused the NEJM of allowing its platform to become a “vehicle for political shaming rather than scientific dialogue.”

These incidents underscore a growing global trend: the infiltration of anti-Israel activism into academic and professional domains once presumed immune to ideological warfare. For Israeli doctors, who save lives indiscriminately, including those of Palestinians, the accusation that they or their nation’s army engage in medical murder is not only false, but morally obscene.

Israel’s Doctors: “We Heal, We Don’t Hate”

As Israel’s hospitals continue treating victims from across the region, including Gazan patients brought into Israeli ICUs, its leading physicians are making a larger statement:
Medicine must remain a sanctuary of truth, not a battlefield of lies.

Prof. Matot summed it up bluntly:

“If politics infects science, then truth dies on the operating table.”

Editorial Summary

This episode serves as a cautionary tale about how anti-Israel disinformation has metastasized into scientific institutions, eroding the foundational principles of objectivity and peer review. The forced apology from the British Journal of Anaesthesia stands as a rare victory for truth, a moment when Israeli professionals reclaimed the sanctity of science from ideological hijacking.