World Medical Association Rejects Push to Suspend Israeli Medical Association Despite Torture Allegations

The World Medical Association's General Assembly met in Rotterdam last month with a petition on the table: 6,500 signatures from medical personnel, organized by the IMA Out! campaign, demanding the expulsion of the Israeli Medical Association. The WMA did not act on it.

Hundreds of doctors protested outside the assembly as it convened. Some carried a shroud printed with the names of 18,000 Palestinian children killed in Gaza during the war.

The petition argued that the IMA has failed to uphold the WMA's own 1975 Declaration of Tokyo, which bars doctors from participating in torture and obligates them to report it. Advocates point to documented allegations of Israeli medical professionals overseeing or failing to intervene in the torture of Palestinian detainees, and to the deaths of Palestinian healthcare workers held in Israeli custody.

The Hind Rajab Foundation, which pursues war crimes complaints against Israel, filed a submission to the International Criminal Court last month urging investigation of Israeli doctors, the IMA itself, and officials from Israel's health and defense ministries over alleged involvement in torture. It is, according to campaigners, the first time a WMA member association has been referred to the ICC.

The WMA's last suspension of a member body was in 1976, when it barred South Africa from two general assemblies over doctors' complicity in apartheid-era torture. That precedent is now the central comparison advocates are drawing, and the one the WMA has so far declined to follow.

A pattern going back decades

This is not the first attempt. In 2009, when the WMA held its general assembly in Tel Aviv, 725 physicians from 43 countries presented human rights findings against the IMA. At the time, IMA president Yoram Blachar simultaneously held the WMA presidency and dismissed the allegations as defamatory. In 2016, 71 UK-based doctors made a second push for suspension. The WMA again refused.

The IMA, which represents more than 90 percent of doctors in Israel, is not a passive party in these proceedings. Its current president, Zion Hagay, chairs the WMA's socio-medical affairs committee. Its chief executive, Leah Wapner, sits on the WMA's finance and planning, socio-medical affairs, and medical ethics committees, the bodies that would ordinarily weigh any disciplinary action against her own organization.

Dr Jonathan Fluxman, a retired British GP and organizer with IMA Out! who attended the Rotterdam protests, told Middle East Eye the WMA has ignored reports on Israeli torture for three decades.

"They are behaving in the same way as the US and British governments, by allowing Israel to get away with a genocide. In my view, the WMA is complicit in the IMA's involvement in this."

Fluxman said the question goes to the WMA's core function. "It raises very serious questions about the WMA's role as the international guardian of medical ethics," he said, adding that other national medical associations have expressed concern.

The WMA, founded in 1947 after Nazi-era doctors were implicated in war crimes, now represents 118 countries. Its refusal to act leaves the IMA's membership intact pending any ICC action on the Hind Rajab Foundation complaint.