The following statement has been issued by a group of Australian doctors victimised by pro-Zionist elements because they publicly opposed the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

Several of those involved in drafting this statement have been subjected to vexatious reporting to the Australian Health Practitioners Authority, the country’s principal medical regularity body. These complaints have called on the board to discipline and/or deregister medical professionals, falsely accusing them of antisemitism because they have publicly opposed the Gaza genocide.

As doctors, we are deeply disturbed by the war crimes committed by Israel’s genocidal slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza over the past nine months. The ethnic cleansing and mass murder of the Palestinian people violate all of the medical ethics and principles that our work as doctors is based upon.

Current estimates of the death toll, according to some accounts, are somewhere between 50,000 and 80,000 (Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor), and even over 186,000 (The Lancet), the majority women and children. This is likely an underestimation, with many people still buried under piles of rubble and/or unreported due to being buried by their families rather than going through the hospital system that official figures are based on. Hundreds have also been killed by preventable diseases and starvation.

We are horrified by the bombing and destruction of all hospitals in Gaza and the deliberate targeting of healthcare workers. The latest reports indicate that 1 in 40 healthcare workers has been killed. Humanitarian aid workers and volunteers, including UNRWA workers and their families and international aid workers, such as the World Kitchen team, have also been murdered.

Mass protests and demonstrations during the past nine months—the largest and most sustained in world history—along with countless appeals to our representative professional bodies and elected governments have failed to halt these crimes.

Running parallel with Israel’s murderous assault on the Palestinians, pro-Zionists have unleashed slanderous and anti-democratic attacks on doctors and health workers opposing the genocide.

We have been falsely accused of antisemitism, subjected to harassment, doxxing on social media and the filing of complaints at our workplaces and medical governing bodies, such as the Australian Health Practitioners Authority. This is all to threaten us with the possibility of job loss or deregistration, in an undemocratic attempt to silence us from speaking up for the oppressed.

The Gaza genocide is not an isolated atrocity, nor is the invitation for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to address a joint session of the US Congress on July 24 an aberration. The brutal assault on the Palestinian people is just one front in a global war instigated by US imperialism and its allies which threatens to escalate into a nuclear war. The Netanyahu government is an agent of the American ruling class and its global strategy in the Middle East and internationally.

The same governments supplying Israel with bombs and artillery shells to murder Palestinians are also intensifying the proxy war being waged by Ukraine’s fascistic regime against Russia. The Biden administration is now sanctioning direct attacks on Russian territory with US-supplied missiles and declaring that the American government will not be deterred by the threat of nuclear war. At the same time, the White House is stepping up its confrontation with China.

Recognition of these facts is the precondition for the urgent development of a powerful mass movement against war, genocide and dictatorial regimes. This is why we are urging doctors, health workers, medical students and workers from all sectors of the economy to join the July 24 demonstration in Washington called by the Socialist Equality Party, the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality. Many other organisations have indicated they will join the demonstration.

This event is not to beg the US Congress to change its policies. Nearly nine months of war have demonstrated that there is no “red line” that the cabal of sociopaths in Washington will not cross. Their invitation to Netanyahu—and the billions of dollars in weaponry, including massive US bombs designed to destroy several city blocks and their inhabitants—makes clear to those opposing Israel’s war crimes that a new political orientation and strategy is necessary. There is no place for appealing to the capitalist ruling class for reformist measures.

The purpose of the July 24 demonstration is to set into motion a new and powerful mass antiwar movement of the working class against the Gaza genocide and the global escalation of imperialist militarism by the US and its NATO collaborators.

Such a movement must be based on a break from all establishment parties. It must be international and socialist, and fight against the capitalist profit system, the fundamental cause of war between competing nation states.

Declare war against imperialist war and genocide!

Distribute this statement as widely as possible amongst your colleagues and on social media and email. Sign up to get involved and bring a delegation to the July 24 demonstration.