Renowned medical journal The Lancet has published a petition calling for the suspension of the Israeli Medical Association (IMA) from from the World Medical Association (WMA).
On Saturday, The Lancet published a petition by health organizations such as the People's Health Movement (PHM), Artsen voor Gaza (Doctors for Gaza), and Health Advisory Council of the Jewish Voice for Peace calling for the IMA to be suspended from the WMA over "its failure to speak out against the genocide of Palestinians, the destruction of health-care infrastructure, and the torture and killing of health-care workers in Gaza."
The WMA Congress will now meet in Rotterdam in October to consider the petition.
Leslie London, Emeritus Professor of Public Health at the University of Cape Town and a member of PHM South Africa, told The Lancet that the IMA has "colluded in the unspeakable treatment of Palestinians during this war."
The British Medical Association already suspended ties with the IMA in June, 2025.
WMA distances itself from calls to suspend Israel
The WMA however told The Lancet that it stands against exclusion of any of its members for the actions of their governments as "doing so diminishes our ability to call out injustices, and threatens shrinking the dialogue among physicians at this critical time when consensus in support of our medical ethics is so needed”.
It also pointed out that the IMA is one of the founding members of the WMA and is a "strong advocate for WMA ethics and policies."
Following the publication of the petition, Iranian-Jewish cardiologist Dr Afshine Emrani wrote an open letter to The Lancet.
"I'm a cardiologist. I'm an Iranian Jew who grew up under a regime where medicine was subjugated to the state. What The Lancet just did is a disgrace to my profession," he said.
He listed things that the boycott would actually destroy, including PillCam (revolutionized GI diagnosis), ReWalk (robotic exoskeletons for paralyzed patients) and breakthrough AI diagnostics for cardiac imaging and cancer detection, all of which are developed in Israel.
"Israel has among the highest per-capita rates of medical innovation on earth. These technologies save lives in London, Johannesburg, São Paulo, and New York. Suspending the IMA doesn't punish a government. It severs research collaborations and training partnerships."
Votes for Israel to be kicked out while Iran, Russia, and North Korea remain
Emrani also highlighted the double standards of singling out the IMA when the medical associations of Iran, North Korea and Russia do not face similar boycotts.
"The [Iranian] regime has executed physicians. Imprisoned doctors for treating protesters. Denied healthcare to political prisoners as policy. No petition. No Lancet article. No campaign."
"The moment we expel medical bodies based on political litmus tests is the moment we destroy the neutrality that makes global medicine possible," he said.
Emrani also noted that the WMA was established in 1947 mainly as a response to the atrocities committed by doctors in Nazi Germany during World War II.
This is not the first time that The Lancet has come under fire for its publication of articles relating to Israel.
Notably, in July 2024, The Lancet published a piece authored by doctors Rasha Khatib, Martin McKee and Salim Yusuf, which claimed that “it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.”
Despite the fact it was designated as a “correspondence” or a letter to the editor rather than a peer-reviewed academic article, the article was disseminated on mass, and shared by figures such as UN rapporteur Francesca Albanese.
Three days after the publication, one of the writers, Professor Martin McKee, retracted from the digits he co-provided in his piece, claiming that they were “purely illustrative” and that “our piece has been greatly misquoted and misinterpreted.”