Doctors Against Genocide — a coalition of healthcare workers aimed at halting Israel’s war in Gaza — staged a demonstration at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and 14 other medical centers nationwide Monday afternoon.

The event, which was co-sponsored by a list of other pro-Palestine organizations, drew several dozen attendees to the sidewalk in front of Brigham and Women’s — and prompted hospital leaders to send an internal message distancing the Mass General Brigham system from the demonstration.

During the 90-minute event, participants inaugurated the “Kamal Adwan pop-up free clinic” — named after the hospital in northern Gaza that was raided and closed in December by Israeli forces — in a ribbon-cutting.

In a press release announcing Monday’s national campaign, Doctors Against Genocide urged healthcare workers to call in sick in order to attend the protests and “reflect on the immense moral injury of funding a genocide.”

Doctors Against Genocide co-founder Karameh Hawash-Kuemmerle — an assistant professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and pediatric neurologist at Boston Children’s Hospital — called in sick and attended Monday’s demonstration to address what she described as the symptoms of witnessing genocide.

“It is my duty as a doctor to speak up against atrocities, and it is my duty to actually be able to advocate for the sanctity of life,” Hawash-Kuemmerle said in an interview after the event.

The only treatment for “the trauma of being exposed to violence on a daily basis is to actually organize and work towards ending it,” she added.

Hawash-Kuemmerle said that Boston Children’s Hospital approved her request for paid sick leave and that her colleagues agreed to cover her shifts in her absence.

Hospital Leaders Issue Warnings as Pro-Palestine Health Workers Rally Outside Brigham and Women’s by William Mao and Veronica Paulus, The Harvard Crimson, January 7, 2025

Healthcare workers from across the Bay Area gathered at Stanford University Monday morning as part of a nationwide “pop-up clinic for the treatment of sickness from genocide” and in protest of the continuing war in Gaza.

Close to 40 people gathered at Alumni Lawn at Stanford Medical School around 10 a.m., with several doctors dressed in their white coats while also wearing keffiyehs around their necks and with fabric signs pinned to their backs. The signs read “Not another bomb, not another hospital, not another child” and other statements in red ink.

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“As a Muslim, Arab, American mother and a doctor witnessing the targeted killing of healthcare providers, the killing of civilians, children and even young men and women, and the targeted destructions of hospitals and bombing of ambulances at the hands of the Israeli forces is absolutely sickening,” said Dr. Yusra Husain, an assistant professor at Stanford Medical School. “We as healthcare providers refuse to normalize genocide. Every death and burned child is a shock to our system.”

Bay Area healthcare workers hold ‘pop up clinic’ at Stanford to treat ‘sickness from genocide’ by Caelyn Pender, East Bay Times, January 7, 2025