A group of health-care workers is calling on professional regulators to investigate Canadian doctors and other health-care workers who have served with Israel’s military during its war in Gaza, which the UN has called genocidal.
“Any individual who is a part of the Israeli Defense Force should never be allowed to be anywhere among women and children, and especially Muslim or Arab children,” said Mukarram Zaidi, a physician in Calgary and member of the Canadian Muslim Healthcare Network.
Health Workers Alliance for Palestine (HAP) published its statement earlier this month condemning health-care workers who have served in the Israeli military, saying they undermine public trust in their professions. Twenty-eight groups, including the Canadian Muslim Healthcare Network, signed the statement.
“Patients and learners, especially Palestinians, have every reason to be alarmed and to refuse care and supervision by [health-care workers] and educators with ties to the Israeli military,” HAP said.
“The participation of [health-care workers] in acts that violate human rights is a serious concern. Such acts are explicitly prohibited by the Canadian Medical Association’s Code of Ethics and Professionalism, to which many provincial medical regulatory bodies subscribe.”
“The code clearly emphasizes that physicians should ‘never participate in or support practices that violate basic human rights’ and should ‘never participate in or condone the practice of torture or any form of cruel, inhumane, or degrading procedure.’”
HAP is writing to the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) and provincial regulatory bodies to remind them of their obligations, spokesperson Gur Tsabar told The Maple.
“It’s not HAP’s role to make final determinations without an inquiry,” Tsabar said. “That’s precisely why regulators like the [College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario], physician colleges, nursing colleges and other licensing bodies have to do their job. They have to determine whether any conduct violates professional obligations.”
There are dozens of health professions — beyond doctors — which are regulated. In Ontario, for example, regulated health professions include laboratory technicians, midwives and dentists.
All regulated professionals are expected to abide by codes of conduct and can be investigated if they fail to do so. Nurses, for example, are forbidden to abuse their patients physically, verbally, emotionally, financially or sexually, their code of conduct states. Nurses are also expected to protect their patients from harm.
A spokesperson for the CMA referred questions to provincial regulatory bodies. “It’s the regulatory bodies that are responsible for ensuring the ethical standards are followed, whether inside Canada or elsewhere,” the spokesperson said.
The Maple asked the regulatory colleges of doctors in Canada’s two largest provinces, Ontario and Quebec, for comment but received no response.
There were 1,524 Canadians with dual or multiple citizenships serving in the Israeli military as of 2025, according to Israeli government documents. Fifty-six Canadians without Israeli citizenship, known as “lone soldiers,” were also serving as of 2024.
No Canadian doctors or health-care workers have been accused of wrongdoing in Gaza.
Report Raises Concerns
Some Israeli doctors have participated in and encouraged violence against Palestinians, said Maysa Hawwash, a former physical therapist in Toronto and co-founder of Doctors Against Genocide.
She pointed out that dozens of Israeli doctors signed a statement calling for the Israeli military to attack a hospital in Gaza.
The director of Gaza’s largest hospital, Mohammed Abu Salmiya, alleged after his own detention that Israeli medical workers participated in abusing Palestinians at detention centres.
“The doctor there beats the detainees, and the nurse beats the detainees. This is in violation of all international laws,” he said. “They amputated the feet of several prisoners, those who are suffering from diabetes symptoms due to the lack of medical treatment for them.”
A report on the conditions at Sde Teiman, the military prison where soldiers allegedly sexually assaulted a Palestinian man in 2024, also implicated doctors and medical staff.
Doctors sometimes perform surgery without an anesthesiologist, suggesting “a subpar medical care standard,” the report from Physicians for Human Rights said. Staff are not part of the military’s official medical corps, which means they may not be legally bound by patients’ rights laws.
All the detainees from Gaza are categorized as “unlawful combatants,” allowing ethical standards to be violated, the report also said.
The facility’s field hospital protocol is for patients to receive treatment while handcuffed and blindfolded, according to the report. Additionally, the report said doctors are encouraged not to sign any documents — allowing them to remain anonymous.
Hawwash, the Toronto physical therapist, said doctors should prevent harm to patients instead of participating in it.
“Genocide is a significant and an extreme public health catastrophe,” she told The Maple.
“We feel that doctors, health care workers, have an obligation, not only a moral obligation, but a professional obligation, to prevent harm and use their training and their scientific background to identify the signs of symptoms of this genocide.”
