How MSF Abandoned Neutrality for Anti-Israel Activism

As focus shifts to post-war aid and reconstruction in Gaza, the role played during the conflict by organisations with ostensibly humanitarian objectives is coming under increasing scrutiny. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)—also known as Doctors Without Borders—is a highly problematic example. For decades, MSF was considered a model of universal morality and medical heroism. The NGO’s medical personnel courageously entered dangerous conflict zones to provide desperately needed aid, and in 1999, it was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize “in recognition of the organisation’s pioneering humanitarian work on several continents.” “Our actions,” the MSF website promises, “are guided by medical ethics and the principles of impartiality, independence and neutrality.”

While MSF still claims to promote these values, in recent years, it has often replaced neutrality with activist spin, turning medicine into another highly politicised sector. In particular, it has become a major source of propaganda against the state of Israel. Earlier this year, the organisation draped a large banner down a building near a Jewish publishing house in Amsterdam falsely accusing Israel of perpetrating a “genocide” in Gaza. In a statement delivered at an informal tribunal organised by civil-society groups in Istanbul, MSF’s international president Dr Javid Abdelmoneim said:

Jury, please note that MSF is an independent medical humanitarian organisation. We deliver care to people affected by conflict, epidemics, and disasters—and we speak out about what we witness.

We have worked in Palestine since 1988. In Gaza today, over 1,000 of my Palestinian colleagues and around 40 international staff support hospitals, clinics, and water provision.

Jury, please consider that we bear witness to Israel’s deliberate mass harm to civilians, use of food as a weapon of war, and destruction of the healthcare system, as three key elements in its genocide in Gaza, which takes place in the historical context of the Israeli occupation, colonisation, blockade, and forced displacement of Palestinians across the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

MSF-UK’s website now includes a dedicated “Gaza Genocide” section that declares: “In short, we are witnessing a genocide. Through deliberate actions—including forced displacement, annexation, and mass killings—Israel is systematically destroying the conditions necessary for Palestinian life.”

A prominent example of this trend is a British-Palestinian reconstructive surgeon named Ghassan Abu-Sittah, who entered Gaza on 9 October 2023 under MSF sponsorship just two days after Hamas terrorists rampaged across Southern Israel massacring at least 1,195 people and seizing 251 hostages. Abu-Sittah had already visited Gaza on behalf of MSF, including during the violent conflicts started by Hamas in 2018 and 2019. This time, he spent about six weeks working in hospitals across Gaza, including al-Ahli Arab, al-Shifa, and al-Awda, according to the anti-Israel campaign group Forensic Architecture, which promoted his “situated testimony.” Video footage from 7 October shows wounded hostages being taken by armed Hamas terrorists into al-Shifa hospital. Other doctors reported that “everyone knew” that sections of the hospital were off-limits, and unauthorised individuals who tried to enter could be shot.

On 17 October, Abu-Sittah was working at al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City when a major explosion rocked the compound. MSF immediately quoted him in a press release: “We were operating in the hospital; there was a strong explosion, and the ceiling fell on the operating room. This is a massacre.” Abu-Sittah was one of six Palestinian doctors who held a grotesque press conference from the hospital parking lot surrounded by the bodies of those allegedly killed in the blast. His testimony was broadcast globally, and presented as the objective account of a medical professional who bore witness to a devastating Israeli air strike. With the added credibility bestowed by MSF’s endorsement, his words were used to support international condemnations of Israel for the alleged perpetration of systematic war crimes.

Shortly afterwards, Israel and the US produced evidence showing that the explosion occurred in the hospital parking lot and that it was caused by a misfired Palestinian rocket, not an Israeli airstrike. The New York Times and a number of other major news platforms admitted that their initial coverage had relied on unverified claims and amended their reporting as new information became available. Even Human Rights Watch—hardly an impartial observer of Israeli combat operations—conceded that “the possibility of a large air-dropped bomb, such as those Israel has used extensively in Gaza, [is] highly unlikely.” MSF, on the other hand, refused to correct the record. More than two years later, it has still not retracted or corrected Abu-Sittah’s false testimony.

Failing the Hamas Litmus Test

The inflammatory Al-Ahli hospital hoax shows that much of the Western media remains compulsively addicted to dangerous and self-defeating war journalism.

After Abu-Sittah left Gaza and returned to London, MSF arranged a press conference and interviews with media outlets in which he repeated his lies about the “massacre” he said he said he had witnessed, and accused Israel of “systematically destroying Gaza’s health infrastructure.” During his Foreign Architecture interview, he said that the blast at al-Ahli Hospital was the moment when he decided that Israel’s military campaign “stopped being a war, and became a genocide.” But journalists from major platforms like the Washington Post continued to introduce him as “a surgeon who volunteered with MSF in Gaza,” and used his affiliation with the NGO to fortify his testimony with a veneer of moral authority. As the Israeli journalist and former Associated Press reporter Matti Friedman has explained, journalists rarely challenge the authority of NGO “experts” regarding conflict situations, especially when those conflict situations involve Israel.

For two years, Abu-Sittah has been repeating these calumnies. In a December 2024 interview with the US-based network Democracy Now!, he exclaimed:

Where is the American Medical Association? Where are the royal colleges? Where are the French Medical Association? Western medical institutions, their moral bankruptcy has become so astounding during this genocide. For them to become part of a genocidal enablement apparatus, for their silence and, in a lot of times, their collusion to silence those who speak out against the genocide, for me, as a health professional, you’re shocked at how completely empty of any moral value these medical associations have become, when they have become complicit in a televised genocide which targets doctors.

At a “Divest for Palestine” event in London in March 2025, he accused the UK, France, and Germany of forming “an axis of genocide that has allowed these weapons to reach Israel unabated.” In May 2025, the University of London’s Centre for Palestine Studies featured Abu-Sittah as a speaker, where his presentation was headlined, “The Biosphere of Genocide: Gaza’s Killing Machine.”

Abu Sittah was also featured as an “expert” speaker for a number of ostensibly academic programs, including Harvard’s FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at the Chan School of Public Health. His December 2023 webinar repeated the usual lurid allegations, including the accusation that Israel is engaging in a “strategy of intentional dismantlement and destruction of the Palestinian health sector,” and “destruction of the health system so that those wounded are left to die slowly in front of their families.” In April 2025, FXB organised a screening of a propaganda film featuring Abu-Sittah, in cooperation with Harvard’s Carr Center on Human Rights and the law school’s human-rights program.

Abu-Sittah even co-authored a commentary in esteemed British medical journal The Lancet titled “Break the Selective Silence on the Genocide in Gaza” in July 2025, in which his affiliation was listed as “Office of the Rector, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK.” He also published an “open letter urging professional and academic associations in the fields of health care, public health, and the social sciences to publicly recognise the genocide in Gaza.” His widely circulated interviews and public commentary are filled with incendiary language and reinforced by op-eds in which he accuses Israel of deliberately targeting medical personnel and destroying Gaza’s health system. In February 2024, he tweeted: “Israel fears Palestinian children. They represent the Palestinian tomorrow and are therefore a mortal threat to the Zionist project. That is why Israel has intentionally targeted children in its genocidal war.” Many other posts highlight his intense hatred of Israel, which he has described as “A nation of irredeemable monsters.”

Eventually, Abu-Sittah’s inflammatory rhetoric and flagrant bias apparently became too much even for MSF, and the organisation stopped promoting him. However, this move was harshly criticised by Mohammad Salaymeh, a Palestinian Arab who works for MSF as head of mission support and medical support coordinator. In an October 2025 article for the Public Health Is Political blog, Salaymeh offered this ennobling profile:

After his evacuation from Gaza, Abu Sitta went on to bear witness to the ongoing colonial violence in Gaza through Palestinian eyes, and his calls for political action and affiliation with MSF created a hole in the confines of an MSF-controlled humanitarian narrative. This was followed by a fallout between Abu Sitta and MSF, leading to the barring of the Palestinian surgeon from working for MSF in the Gaza Strip. MSF labelled Abu Sitta as too biased, despite his extensive experience in the area, and his Palestinian witness of Israeli violence was not welcomed by the organization. Abu Sitta’s experience is excluded from reports or media communications, isolating his act of speaking out as a Palestinian as too political and not neutral, therefore not humanitarian.

In the introduction to that post, Salaymeh wrote:

MSF’s practices are part of an effort to both erase and instrumentalize Palestinian narratives: Palestinians provide knowledge, labor, and even death for humanitarian legitimacy, while being excluded from authorship, decision-making, and bearing witness. I ask, who is the humanitarian spectacle for, and who does it benefit?

This entire episode demonstrates that prominent MSF volunteers like Abu-Sittah and officials like Salaymeh believe that the organisation they work for ought to be a vehicle for Palestinian propaganda, first and foremost. This fits a broader pattern of the “medicalization of Hamas disinformation” discussed by the media-monitor CAMERA, in which humanitarian language becomes a conduit for campaigns promoting hatred and falsehood.

Activities like these are a violation of MSF’s professed neutrality and of the ethics it claims to uphold. In October 2023, just a few weeks after the Hamas massacre, MSF’s former secretary general Alain Destexhe observed:

Since the beginning of this war, MSF has not tweeted a single word denouncing the crimes against humanity and war crimes committed by Hamas in Israel, nor has it condemned the hostage-taking of dozens of Israelis, a violation of humanitarian law to which the organization so frequently appeals. A few days ago, during a lengthy interview on France 24, Sarah Chateau, the program director, was given an opening at the end of the interview by the journalist who asked her about the fate of the hostages. However, Ms. Chateau simply replied laconically that she was “sorry” for the hostages, without uttering any condemnation whatsoever. 

That December, Destexhe published a 47-page report titled “MSF: An Accomplice of Hamas? The Neutrality and Independence of the International Organization Called into Question in Gaza.” Asked by the French Atlantico website what he hoped to achieve with the report, Destexhe was blunt:

First, alert the press, if you will. Given MSF’s notoriety as a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and since there aren’t many witnesses present in Gaza, MSF’s word is taken at face value. I gave you the example of that doctor at Ahli Arab Hospital. His testimony isn’t credible. In other words, the first thing I want to do with this report is to raise awareness that we must stop taking what MSF says as gospel, so to speak. We must verify our sources and cross-check them—in short, do journalistic work. 

The second point is to acknowledge that MSF is not neutral in this conflict and is violating its charter; it is violating its neutrality, its impartiality, and its independence. MSF is supposed to be neutral, impartial, and independent. There may be a form of complicity with Hamas if we consider MSF’s communications since October 7th.

Finally, one last thing: it would be interesting and even essential regarding the fate of the hostages to know exactly what MSF staff in Al-Shifa knew, both about the use of the hospital as a military structure by Hamas before the war and during the conflict in connection with the detention of the hostages. These are the three major points I wish to emphasize.

The organisation once lauded as the embodiment of global humanitarianism has become a font of disinformation, hypocrisy, and politicised medicine. MSF’s public communications, including its influential social-media channels, continue to frame the Israel-Hamas conflict in a way that disfigures or omits important facts and context, such as Hamas’s systematic abuse of medical facilities and schools for military purposes.

The cases of Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah, Mohammad Salaymeh, and others expose a deep credibility crisis at the heart of MSF. The only time that its leadership appears to exercise oversight is when external pressure threatens the NGO’s reputation and influence. To prevent further damage, it is vitally necessary to restore and enforce MSF’s humanitarian mission, based on universal medical ethics and the principle of “do no harm” without exception.