‘Farcical reality’: Healthcare workers respond to targeting over pro-Palestine symbols
Submitted by Fleur Hargreaves on Tue, 07/07/2026 - 11:08
MPs and NHS workers raise concern about the move to ban medical scrubs at protests and pro-Palestine symbols at work
Protestors hold placards outside The Royal Courts of Justice, Britain's High Court, in London on 13 February (AFP/Ben Stansall) Off The move to ban NHS staff from displaying political symbols in the workplace and wearing medical scrubs in protests has been widely condemned by politicians and healthcare workers, who say it is using fears of antisemitism to crack down on expressions of solidarity with Palestine.
Middle East Eye spoke to a number of pro-Palestine NHS workers about their experience campaigning against the genocide in Gaza and the backlash they have faced from their workplace as a result.
The Mann report was commissioned by former health secretary Wes Streeting in 2025 to investigate antisemitism in the NHS.
However, the British Medical Association (BMA) noted that, although the need to combat antisemitism and racism within the NHS is vital, some of the recommendations from the report are “deeply concerning” in how they might be implemented, particularly with regard to freedom of speech and expression.
While NHS England has adopted the guidance, it is up to individual NHS trusts to implement it.
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The BMA raised concerns about the “question of who gets to decide what counts as political”, calling for new guidance to be “consistent across the country” and to “clearly distinguish legitimate expression from misconduct”, claiming that “a blanket ban on all symbols that could be construed to express a belief would go too far”.
Labour MP Kim Johnson reiterated these reservations, telling Middle East Eye: “I am concerned that a blanket ban on so-called political symbols risks conflating legitimate expressions of identity, solidarity and inclusion with misconduct.
Palestinian NHS nurse takes legal action over rebuke for 'antisemitic' watermelon video call Read More »
“Expressions of solidarity with Palestine have been singled out in this debate, against a broader backdrop of state clampdown on support and advocacy for Palestinians rights,” she added.
While highlighting the importance of tackling racism and harassment within the health service, Johnson pointed out that “restricting legitimate expressions of solidarity risks undermining this work rather than addressing it”.
Nina Radulovic, a spokesperson for Medact, an organisation of medical workers campaigning for health justice, told MEE that “political expression in the NHS is undoubtedly a sensitive issue” which “raises difficult questions about the limits of freedom of expression, its relationship to workplace cohesion, and its impact on service delivery”.
However, they said that the Mann report’s recommendations, “rather than opening a conversation… delivers a verdict”.
“Some politicians and sections of the press appear more interested in finding ways to suppress expressions of dissent than in creating opportunities for meaningful discussion,” added Radulovic, claiming that these actors would prefer to “manufacture a panic around badges than to engage with ethical questions that health workers are raising about the NHS, corporate power, and the UK’s role in the political economy of war.”
Targeting of healthcare workers
Professor Nick Maynard, a British surgeon who has been to Gaza many times and served in hospitals during the Israeli genocide, told MEE that the reporting around the recommendation is “conflating support for Palestine with antisemitism”, which is “dishonest” and “typical of what our government is promoting at the moment”, as an extension of Streeting’s attacks on doctors standing up for Palestine.
While in Gaza, Maynard saw first-hand the devastation caused by what UN experts have termed a “medicide”.
Part of this is Israel’s use of “double-tap” strikes to target health workers and first responders arriving at the scene to treat those wounded in the first attack.
'I was doxxed': UK doctors welcome BMA protections for criticism of Israel Read More »
Maynard said that the “deliberate targeting of healthcare workers and the whole healthcare infrastructure is a very central core of [Israel’s] policy to ethnically cleanse Gaza,” which is why it has caused such outrage and condemnation among healthcare workers internationally.
He personally spoke to Streeting about what he observed, but, despite recent positioning to present himself as pro-Palestinian, the former health secretary has been at the forefront of a campaign to silence health workers over Palestine.
Dr Omar Abdel-Mannan, who has worked in the NHS for 15 years and co-founded Health Workers 4 Palestine, explained that “this is part of a wider shutting down, a wider censorship, silencing that we have seen across multiple sectors.
“There is a fear of health workers because of the power of their words… they fear the fact that they speak the truth and that people trust what they say,” he added.
Having conducted a number of legal requests for information, he pointed out that the NHS has no way of gathering information about instances of racism from within a number of trusts, leading him to question “how the review is meant to address something that they don’t even have any information on”.
He said that the targeting of Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a Palestinian doctor working in the UK who was reported to the General Medical Council (GMC) for his pro-Palestine activism, has had a “chilling effect” on health workers wanting to speak out or signal their support for the Palestinians.
Disciplining health workers protesting genocide
Abu-Sittah was reported to the GMC by UK Lawyers for Israel, a pro-Israel legal activist group, but subsequent tribunals twice found that there was no basis for their accusations of antisemitism.
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Abu Sittah said that Streeting had pressured the GMC into a “McCarthyite witch hunt against me and other doctors who spoke out against the genocide”, which Abdel-Mannan said was an “unprecedented” political intervention.
Ahmad Baker, a British-Palestinian nurse working at Whipps Cross hospital, was ordered by managers to remove a still life painting with a watermelon in it from his video call background, claiming it was “potentially antisemitic”.
Baker has now launched a legal challenge against Barts Health NHS Trust alongside two other NHS employees.
Speaking with MEE, he said that, as a Palestinian, “I am now being told that my identity should not be on display” during a time when Israel is conducting a genocide against Palestinian people for this identity.
He pointed out the hypocrisy that, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, NHS staff wearing a Ukraine badge were not treated with the level of controversy afforded to those wearing a Palestinian one.
Still life painting used as a video call background by NHS nurse Ahmad Baker for which he was disciplined on the grounds that it was 'potentially antisemitic' (Provided)
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“The symbolism of the badges is an important thing, because it is a display of solidarity”, he said, that, like attending pro-Palestine marches, communicates support and proves you are not a “lone voice” but part of a wider movement – which is why there is an attempt to shut this down.
He added that “neutrality in healthcare is understood in the wrong ways”: while the delivery of care is neutral, there is no such impartiality when it comes to political opinions, and indeed health workers are often compelled to take an “active stance” against a genocide, rather than being silent.
Advocacy group Health Workers for a Free Palestine told MEE that adopting Mann’s recommendations “would create a farcical reality where managers are pulled away from focssing on patient care to arbitrate whether a piece of fruit or a geometric shape is grounds for disciplinary action, all whilst the Palestinian health system is systematically destroyed as part of an ongoing genocide.”
Banning medical scrubs at protests
Dr Aarash Saleh, who, alongside Dr Sara Ali, joined Baker in taking legal action against Barts trust, told MEE that one of his colleagues was disciplined for wearing watermelon earrings.
He said that, despite Lord Mann taking pains to emphasise that the review should not be weaponised against pro-Palestinan voices, the ban against political symbols has “almost never applied for any other reason” than against those supporting Palestine.
'Healthcare professionals should not be required to abandon their humanity when they come to work'
- Dr Sara Ali
But what is even less justifiable, Saleh added, is the move to prohibit health workers from wearing medical scrubs on protests.
“It is a bit monstrous to tell… healthcare workers, who have this history of advocacy for people that are marginalised… that has to stop now, because someone tells you they are offended by you going on marches for peace in the Middle East.”
He called the decision an “overreach” on the part of the government to limit the ability of doctors to march as doctors rather than private individuals against the genocide and in solidarity with their colleagues being targeted by Israel in Gaza.
Dr Sara Ali told MEE: “I find it deeply troubling that an institution whose core purpose is the provision of care should regard expressions of human empathy and solidarity with a people undergoing a genocide as inappropriate or objectionable.
“Defending the right to express such solidarity is important because healthcare professionals should not be required to abandon their humanity when they come to work,” she added, because “compassion and empathy for human suffering are not separate from our professional values - they are fundamental to them.”
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