A nurse was fired by a New York City hospital after she returned Israel’s war in Gaza as a ‘genocide’ during an award acceptance speech.
Labor and delivery nurse Hesen Jabr, a Palestinian-American, was honored by NYU Langone Health for her compassion in caring for mothers who had lost babies when she drew a connection between her work and the suffering of mothers in Gaza.
“It pains me to see the women of my country itself suffering unimaginable losses during the current genocide in Gaza,” Jabr said, according to a video of the May 7 speech she posted on social media. “For those reasons, this award is very personal to me.”
Jabr wrote on Instagram that she arrived at work on May 22 for her first shift back after receiving the award, when she was called to a meeting with the hospital’s president and vice president of nursing “to discuss how I ‘endangered others’ and ‘ruined the ceremony’ and ‘offended people’ because a small part of my speech was a tribute to the grieving mothers in my country.”
She wrote that after working most of her shift, she was “dragged into an office again,” where she was read her resignation letter and then escorted out of the building.
A spokesperson for NYU Langone, Steve Ritea, confirmed that Jabr was fired after her speech and said that “a prior incident” had also occurred.
“Hesen Jabr was warned in December, following a previous incident, not to bring its views on this divisive and charged issue to the workplace,” Mr Ritea said in a statement. She instead chose not to address it at a recent staff event that was widely attended by her colleagues, some of whom were angered by her comments. As a result, Jabr is no longer an employee of NYU Langone. ”
Ritea did not provide any details about the earlier incident.
Jabr defended her speech in an interview with The New York Times, saying that talking about the war “was so relevant” given the nature of the award she had won.
“It was a mourning award; it was for grieving mothers,” she said.
The Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza says more than 36,000 people have been killed in the area in the war that began with the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. About 80% of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents have been displaced and UN officials say parts of the territory are experiencing famine.
Critics say Israel’s military campaign amounts to genocide, and South Africa’s government formally accused the country of genocide in January when it asked the United Nations Supreme Court to to put an end to Israeli military operations in Gaza.
Israel has denied the charge of genocide and told the International Court of Justice it is doing everything it can to protect the civilian population of Gaza.
Jabr is not the first employee of the hospital, which was renamed NYU Medical Center after a major donation from Republican Party donor and billionaire Kenneth Langone, to be fired over comments about the conflict in the Middle East.
A prominent researcher who headed the hospital’s cancer center was fired after posting anti-Hamas political cartoons, including caricatures of Arab people. That researcher, biologist Benjamin Neel, has now sued the hospital.
Jabr’s firing wasn’t her first time in the spotlight either. When she was eleven years old, the American Civil Liberties Union in Louisiana filed a lawsuit on her behalf after she was forced to accept a Bible from the principal of her public school.
“This isn’t my first rodeo,” she told the Times.
