NEW YORK (AP) — A nurse was fired from a New York hospital after she called Israel’s war in Gaza “genocide” in her award acceptance speech.
Midwife and obstetric nurse Hesen Jabr, a Palestinian-American, was honored by NYU Langone Health for her compassionate care of mothers who had lost their babies, drawing a connection between her work and the suffering of mothers in the Gaza Strip.
“It pains me to see the women of my country suffering unimaginable losses themselves during the current genocide in Gaza,” Jabr said, according to a video of her May 7 speech posted on social media. “For these reasons, this award is very dear to my heart.”
Jabr wrote on Instagram that she came to work on May 22 for her first shift after receiving the award and was called into a meeting with the hospital’s president and vice president of nursing “to discuss how I ‘put others in danger’ and ‘ruined the ceremony’ and ‘insulted people’ because a small part of my speech was a tribute to the grieving mothers in my country.”
She wrote that after completing most of her shift, she was “dragged back into an office,” where she was read her resignation letter and then escorted out of the building.
A spokesman for NYU Langone, Steve Ritea, confirmed that Jabr was fired following her speech and said there had been “an incident before that as well.”
“Hesen Jabr was warned in December not to voice her views on this controversial and volatile issue in the workplace following a previous incident,” Ritea said in a statement. “She instead chose not to heed this at a recent employee recognition event attended by many of her colleagues, some of whom were upset by her comments. As a result, Jabr is no longer an employee of NYU Langone.”
Ritea did not provide any information about the previous incident.
Jabr defended her speech in an interview with The New York Times, saying talking about the war was “so relevant” given the nature of the award she won.
“It was an award for grieving mothers,” she said.
According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, more than 36,000 people have been killed in the territory during the war that began with Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7. About 80 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents have been displaced, and UN officials say parts of the territory are facing famine.
Critics say Israel’s military action amounts to genocide and the South African government formally charged the country in January when it asked the United Nations Supreme Court to order a halt to Israeli military operations in the Gaza Strip.
Israel denies the accusation of genocide and told the International Court of Justice that it was doing everything in its power to protect the civilian population of the Gaza Strip.
Jabr is not the first employee of the hospital, which was renamed NYU Medical Center after a generous donation from Republican party donor and billionaire Kenneth Langone, who was fired for comments on the Middle East conflict.
A prominent researcher who headed the hospital’s cancer center was fired after publishing anti-Hamas political cartoons, including caricatures of Arabs. The researcher, biologist Benjamin Neel, has since filed a lawsuit against the hospital.
Jabr’s firing wasn’t her first time in the spotlight, either. When she was 11, the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana filed a lawsuit on her behalf after she was forced to accept a Bible by the principal of her public school.
“This isn’t my first rodeo,” she told the Times.
