A new Zionist healthcare lobby is preparing a class action against Australian health regulators over “vexatious antisemitic/antizionist complaints” against Zionist doctors. Wendy Bacon and Stephanie Tran report.
The Israel lobby has formed a new Zionist group, which joins Israellycool, @Notmydoctor48, and @physiciansagainstantisemitism2 to opposed healthcare professionals in Australia who express concerns over Israel’s aggression against doctors and others in Gaza.
Doctors who have publicly opposed Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza say the move is deeply hypocritical: the same network has spent the past two years orchestrating coordinated campaigns to silence pro-Palestinian voices in medicine. The campaigns often involve encouraging members of the public to lodge vexatious complaints against doctors who express solidarity with Palestinians.
The Australian Zionist Healthcare Alliance (AZHA) announced the planned class action last week, targeting the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA), the Health Care Complaints Commission (HCCC), and national health boards.
The AZHA are currently in the process of collating complaints made against healthcare workers for “being Jewish/Zionist or supporting Jews and/or Israel” and intends to use these complaints as the basis of their class action.
AZHA describes itself as “Australia’s first dedicated Zionist healthcare advocacy organisation”. It was quietly registered in August 2025 as an incorporated association and officially launched on 10 October.
AZHA is led by Dr Karen Fink (president) and Dr Deborah Bell (vice-president), and public officer Sharon Stoliar. Dr Fink and Dr Bell are both part of the Alliance Against Antisemitism in Healthcare, the organisation that laid a complaint against Professor Peter Macdonald in early October.
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During the 2025 Federal Election campaign, Stoliar campaigned with the Minority Impact Coalition, which was supported by right-wing group Advance Australia. Stoliar has said that she became frustrated when her complaints against health workers chanting “From the River to the Sea” were not accepted as ‘genocidal’.
This week, she has been promoting Israel’s International Medical Aliyah program to ease the way for Australian doctors to migrate to Israel.
Earlier this month, after being lobbied by AZHA, Senator Andrew Bragg questioned AHPRA in Senate Estimates about antisemitism complaints they received.
A pattern: identify, dox, report
Multiple pro-Israel platforms, including Israellycool, @Notmydoctor48, and @physiciansagainstantisemitism2, have published names, workplaces, photos, and social media posts of Australian doctors expressing concern about the destruction of hospitals and targeting of healthcare workers in Gaza. Members of the public are urged to ‘report’ these clinicians to AHPRA and make complaints to their employers.
General practitioner Dr Akil Islam became the subject of multiple articles on Israel-based website Israellycool after posting about Gaza on LinkedIn and speaking at community rallies.
“They set up this site so that at the click of a button, people could report me to AHPRA,” he told MWM.
People also contacted my workplace asking for me to be fired.
The article was promoted on the Israellycool Instagram page with the caption “Please join me in reporting Dr Islam to the @ahpra_nationalboards”.
The eSafety Commissioner issued a notice to Israellycool, finding that the webpage constituted “cyberabuse material” and “the Material would appear to be designed to encourage those who follow and agree with the views of the person responsible to harass the complainant by contacting their workplace and the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency”.
Instead of removing the material, the website published a further three articles on Dr Islam. The website’s author then collaborated with Avi Yemini, a far-right Australian-Israeli commentator, to produce a YouTube video ridiculing the eSafety Commissioner’s notice.
After multiple complaints were made against Dr Islam, he received a call from AHPRA informing him that an investigation had been commenced. Dr Islam says he was not informed of the substance or source of the complaint.
“I wasn’t allowed to know who made the complaint, what the complaint contained, what material the complaint was based on, except for the fact that APHRA took issue with me saying, ‘from the river to the sea Palestine will be free,’ which is not in breach of anything.”
“When they did give me the formal complaint letter, the due date for response was prior to the date the letter was created – so it’s just a complete shambles.”
When Dr Islam contacted his medical indemnity insurer, they told him hundreds of similar complaints had been lodged nationwide, so many that,
additional staff were hired to process them.
“When I contacted my medical indemnity insurance, they informed me that there were hundreds of complaints like this. They told me that they had to recruit more people because of these complaints, and basically nobody has had any findings made against them from these investigations,” he said.
Dr Islam was eventually cleared. He noted that the opaque and prolonged process had chilling effects.
“The AHPRA complaint eventually fizzled out, and they exonerated me. It was a baseless complaint, but it’s a method of intimidation to silence doctors who don’t want the impunity of Israel to continue.”
Palestinian-Australian doctor, Dr Adrian Conner, says he also faced an AHPRA complaint after organising a fundraiser for Palestinian medical aid supported by his hospital.
“My hospital received a complaint after a PANZMA (Palestinian Australian New Zealand Medical Association) fundraiser we did. We raised about $40,000 from the local community, and the local newspaper did a small piece about it,” he said.
The fundraiser was referenced in the complaint – they said I was spreading antisemitism in the community.
After a few months, the complaint against Dr Conner dissolved.
“The complaint just seemed to disappear. I still have no idea what’s going on with it.”
Intimidation tactics
Dr Conner says these vexatious complaints are part of a broader pattern in which professional reporting mechanisms are leveraged to intimidate healthcare workers who speak publicly about Gaza.
“The underlying motive of vexatious anti-semitism complaints is to silence healthcare workers. This is an apparatus of genocide which has been presented to the UN on multiple occasions, including by Dr Abu Sittah.”
It is imperative to the Zionist project that dehumanisation of Palestinians is maintained.
“Ultimately the underlying issue is AHPRA has been hijacked to perform the bidding of racist individuals and organisations instead of focusing on patient safety.”
Dr Conner says racism has intensified within the healthcare sector.
“We know through multiple surveys that Islamophobic and anti-Palestinian racism is going up in our workplaces. In the last few years, I have heard ‘all Palestinians are terrorists’, ‘Palestinians use their kids as human shields’ and ‘Palestinian men are starving the children in Gaza’. It is extremely difficult to offer dignified responses to such dehumanising rhetoric. Especially when some colleagues choose to shamelessly express debunked Israeli propaganda over reports from the UN, humanitarian aid organisations, as well as countless testimonies from international aid workers, including Australian doctors.”
Regulatory bodies deny bias
AHPRA told MWM it had received 209 notifications against 101 practitioners between October 2023 and October 2025 relating to antisemitism and Islamophobia. According to AHPRA, “around half of those relate to a complaint about antisemitism, another half were about Islamophobia.” Of these complaints, 190 have been closed and “two practitioners have been referred to the relevant tribunal for alleged professional misconduct”.
“Practitioners will not be investigated solely for expressing personal views online – including advocating for the protection of healthcare workers, civilians, or infrastructure,” AHPRA said.
“All notifications to AHPRA about the Gaza conflict are managed within a single specialist team consisting of appropriately trained staff to manage these types of notifications in an appropriate, humane and efficient way.”
A spokesperson for the Health Care Complaints Commission said it had systems to “identify and manage complaints that appear repetitive, malicious or made without genuine intent to raise legitimate concerns” and close them promptly.
AZHA did not respond to a request for comment.
Gaza ‘Medicide’
At least 1,722 healthcare workers have been killed in Gaza during the two years of Israel’s genocide. More than 300 healthcare workers have been detained, with some experiencing torture at the hands of Israeli authorities.
Doctors have also been deliberately targeted and murdered by the Israeli military.
Among the most high-profile cases was the killing of Dr Marwan al-Sultan, director of Gaza’s Indonesian Hospital and one of Gaza’s most senior physicians. In July 2025, an Israeli missile struck the apartment where he was staying with his family. His wife, daughter, sister and son-in-law were also killed in the attack.
In August 2025, a panel of United Nations experts warned that Israeli forces were carrying out what they called “medicide” through the systematic destruction of Gaza’s ability to deliver healthcare.
“In addition to bearing witness to an ongoing genocide, we are also bearing witness to a ‘medicide’, a sinister component of the intentional creation of conditions calculated to destroy Palestinians in Gaza,” the experts said.
Health and care workers have been continuously targeted, detained, tortured and are now, like the rest of the population, being starved.
The experts described deliberate strikes on medical workers and facilities as gross violations of international humanitarian law.
The World Health Organization has repeatedly warned that Gaza’s health system has been pushed to breaking point. By May 2025, at least 94% of all hospitals in the territory were damaged or destroyed.
“The destruction is systematic. Hospitals are rehabilitated and resupplied, only to be exposed to hostilities or attacked again. This destructive cycle must end,” the WHO warned.
Medical colleges fail to support doctors
The targeting of healthcare workers who speak out against the human rights violations perpetrated by the Israeli government is a deliberate strategy, says Dr Islam.
“There’s a clear pattern here. It’s been acknowledged in the UK and the US that pro-Israel lobby groups are specifically targeting outspoken Western health professionals who are presenting the evidence of human rights violations against Palestinians in Gaza. It’s a strategic and widespread tactic to intimidate doctors around the country and continue the impunity of Israel.”
“It would be only appropriate for such an organised strategy to be condemned and rooted out by the organisations that represent medical professionals.”
Dr Conner and Dr Islam met with representatives of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) and the Australian College of Rural and Remote Medicine (ACRRM) to raise concerns about a pattern of vexatious complaints being filed against pro-Palestinian doctors.
The doctors presented evidence showing that the complaints coincided with public statements condemning Israel’s assault on Gaza, statements that were consistent with the consensus of leading medical journals, including The Lancet and The British Medical Journal, which have documented grave human rights violations against healthcare workers and patients in Gaza. Yet, the colleges failed to take meaningful action on the issue.
“You feel like you’re living in two different worlds. You’re constantly reminded by social media of the horror of the genocide in Gaza every day, but when you try to reach out to your representative body to advocate for human rights, you’re met with complete silence,” said Dr Islam.
“The worst thing about this is feeling that your senior colleagues are prepared to accept the cheapness of Palestinian life and are not willing to uphold values that you felt everyone held as members of the Australian medical fraternity.”
The RACGP said it planned to raise the issue of vexatious complaints with AHPRA at its next meeting. The ACRRM did not provide a comment.
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Stephanie is a journalist with a passion for uncovering stories that hold power to account. With a background in both law and journalism, she has worked at The Guardian and as a paralegal, where she assisted Crikey’s defence team in the high-profile defamation case brought by Lachlan Murdoch. Her reporting has been recognised nationally, earning her the 2021 Democracy’s Watchdogs Award for Student Investigative Reporting and a nomination for the 2021 Walkley Student Journalist of the Year Award.
Wendy Bacon is an investigative journalist who was the Professor of Journalism at UTS. She worked for Fairfax, Channel Nine and SBS and has published in The Guardian, New Matilda, City Hub and Overland. She has a long history in promoting independent and alternative journalism.
She is a long-term supporter of a peaceful BDS and the Greens.