Nurse Fired After Calling the Gaza War a ‘Genocide’ in Speech

NYU Langone Health bestowed an award on a labor and delivery nurse for providing compassionate care to mothers who had lost babies.

But shortly after, the nurse said, the hospital fired her over the speech she gave when she accepted the award.

In it, she spoke of the suffering of Palestinian women amid the Israel-Hamas war, which she called a “genocide.” The nurse, Hesen Jabr, is not the first medical worker to be fired at NYU Langone, a major New York hospital system, over commentary about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The hospital is currently embroiled in a lawsuit by a prominent cancer researcher, who was fired from his job as the director of its cancer center after he posted a variety of anti-Hamas political cartoons. Some included offensive caricatures of Arab people.

“It pains me to see the women from my country going through unimaginable losses themselves during the current genocide in Gaza,” said Ms. Jabr, who is Palestinian-American. “This award is deeply personal to me for those reasons.”

Ms. Jabr said that these remarks led to her firing on May 22 after she returned to work following the ceremony. “As soon as I walked into the unit, I was dragged into an impromptu meeting with the President and Vice President of Nursing at NYU Langone to discuss how I ‘put others at risk’ and ‘ruined the ceremony’ and ‘offended people’ because a small part of my speech was a tribute towards the grieving mothers in my country,” she wrote in a post on Instagram.

She said that she then worked most of her shift before being summoned to an office where she was fired and escorted off the premises.