On 14 August 2024, Nadeem Crowe, an emergency doctor at Royal Free Hospital in London, received an email while at work informing him, without explanation, that he had been suspended from duties. He was subsequently sent home. In the days that followed, it was revealed that the reason for the suspension was his sharing on social media of widely circulated footage from the notorious Israeli detention and torture camp, Sde Teiman, in which a Palestinian prisoner is seen being raped by his Israeli guards. Alongside the footage, Crowe commented that such abuses, now seen with regularity, would go down in both Israeli and Jewish history.

Having been informed of the grounds for his disciplinary action, Crowe’s suspension came into effect in March 2025. The initial report of his social media use was submitted anonymously, with the accusation of bringing the NHS into disrepute, and the complaints were supported by NHS England. All available information about the complaint against him was obtained only by Crowe’s submission of a Freedom of Information request.

The disciplinary action against Crowe has caused him significant financial and reputational damage, as well as the obvious personal distress of losing his livelihood. He is currently crowdfunding for his legal fees and practising privately outside of the NHS, though he tells me he is now unsure whether he wants to continue in medicine at all.

Crowe, who is of British-Jordanian background, has been integral to NHS care. As a cardiologist in emergency medicine, his expertise, like that of many NHS professionals, is not easily replaced. His removal is all the more troubling given his ability to work and the severe staffing pressures across the health service.

Rehiana Ali, a consultant neurologist, has been suspended pending the outcome of a General Medical Council (GMC) investigation, also over her social media posts. In response to a surge of online admiration for Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar following the release of a video showing his final moments, defiantly throwing a stick at an Israeli drone, Ali remarked that by choosing to publish such footage, Israel risked turning Sinwar ‘into a legend.’ Right-wing British media outlets have since misrepresented her comment, accusing the NHS doctor herself of having called Sinwar ‘a legend.’

These dismissals and suspensions are not the first time NHS hospitals have given in to anti-Palestinian activism. In February 2023, a group of pro-Israel doctors at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital lobbied successfully for the removal of a display of artwork at the hospital featuring drawings and paintings by Palestinian children in Gaza, arguing that Palestinian artworks, even children’s drawings, might distress Jewish patients. The key organisation behind the removal of the artwork, UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI), has since attracted public outcry by claiming that Israel’s starvation of Gaza could address Palestinian obesity rates. 

A consultant at a London hospital, speaking again on condition of anonymity, pointed to the General Medical Council (GMC), which Rehiana Ali is currently suing over its treatment of her, as a central part of the problem. He described the GMC’s ‘constant overreach and willingness to interfere in every aspect of doctors’ lives,’ accusing it of ‘preaching medical ethics while demonstrating a startling absence of them.’ Its typical approach, he said, is to scapegoat individual doctors when mistakes occur while downplaying deeper systemic failures.

The pattern of censorship emerging within the NHS poses a serious threat on multiple fronts. It undermines the fundamental right to voice morally and legally grounded responses to the genocide in Palestine, while denying healthcare professionals, whose work centres on protecting human life, the space to express visceral, even professionally appropriate, reactions to mass violence against bodies. Silencing medics on issues with clear health implications reduces them to technicians — masseurs, not moral agents — stripped of the ethical purpose that defines their vocation.

There is also a clear racial dimension. White doctors are investigated by the GMC at half the rate of their colleagues from other ethnic backgrounds — a disparity the GMC has pledged to address by 2026. These investigations are far from trivial: between 2018 and 2020, 29 doctors died while under GMC investigation, five of them by suicide.

Against this backdrop, the Asian or Muslim heritage of those targeted makes the Islamophobic character of the backlash over Palestine impossible to ignore. It also underscores the extent to which Israeli lobbying is either intensifying or exploiting entrenched institutional racism. Beyond this prejudice lies a deeper tension: given the NHS’s ethnic diversity and growing nationwide support for Palestine, particularly among younger generations, Britain’s steadfast support for Israel sits uneasily with the composition and values of modern British society, especially within institutions like the NHS.

Aimé Césaire’s theory of the imperial boomerang suggests that violence inflicted at the colonial periphery eventually returns to the imperial centre. That dynamic is starkly visible today: the unchecked impunity granted to Israel in Palestine is echoed in the power of pro-Israel advocacy to derail careers and reputations in Britain, often through vague allegations of prejudice coupled with institutional and media pressure.

The accused doctors, along with others who have been attacked in the media, have found solidarity with one another in online communities, where they share their organising ideas and experiences in the face of their enforced hardships and base injustice.

The ready ability of doctors like Nadeem Crowe to continue practising privately, drawing on a career of professional excellence and indiscriminate care, underscores that this is not a question of professional standards, but of political conformity. An understaffed NHS, and the British state more broadly, must ask whether it can accommodate this level of alignment with pro-Israel orthodoxy, alongside the separate question of whether the broader public even wishes to.