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embedded in israel’s health system while Israel refuses to help 20,000 injured in gaza.....

State governments and major hospitals are deeply are embedded in Israel’s health ‘ecosystem’, while Israel refuses to help 20,000 injured in Gaza. Wendy Bacon and Cathy Peters report.

NSW and Victorian governments’ support for Israel was on display during Israeli President Herzog’s visit. What has not been so public is how ties with Israel are already embedded in state health systems, while Israel continues to strike medical workers and centres as it bombs Iran and Lebanon, continues to block urgent medical assistance to Palestinians in Gaza, and attempts to ban some 37 medical aid NGOs.

 

Medicide. Australian healthcare’s tight links with Israel, despite Gaza

 

For years, Israeli organisations have worked to incorporate Australian health systems and hospitals into their ‘health ecosystems’ by exploiting Israel’s preferred image as a hi-tech leader, a ‘start-up nation’.

However, in light of Israel’s destruction of the Palestinian health system, efforts to strengthen links between the Australian and Israeli health systems raise ethical questions about complicity with genocide.

Concerned Australian healthcare workers from Nurses and Midwives for Palestine, Health Workers for Palestine NSW and Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand Doctors for Palestine told MWM,

“As healthcare professionals, we find it absolutely reprehensible that Australian health institutions would even consider partnering with Israeli counterparts who have either actively supported, or failed to condemn, Israel’s medicide of Palestinian healthcare workers – with over 1700 murdered – and annihilation of Gaza’s healthcare system.”

Their opposition to Israeli partnerships reflects similar concerns in Canada and the US.

Sheba connections

Despite international legal findings of Israel’s genocide and ongoing war crimes, the Victorian State Government, NSW Health, Monash Health, Monash University, the Peter MacCallum Centre, Silvershain, St Vincents Health and Invest Victoria are strategic partners with Israel’s largest government-run health facility, Sheba Medical Centre.

Two Australian-based charities. Australian Friends of Sheba Medical Centre and Hadassah Australia have tax-deductible status and fundraise for two of Israel’s leading hospitals, Sheba Medical Centre and Hadassah. The Melbourne-based Gandel Foundation made a significant tax-deductible donation to the $132US million Gandel Rehabilitation Centre for Israeli soldiers at Hadassah Mount Scopus. Melbourne rich listers John and Pauline Gandel are its principal donors.

Sheba Medical Centre is a major supporter and trainer of medical teams for the IDF, particularly during the Gaza genocide. It joined with Elbit Systems to use its military thermal imaging technology, which has been used against Palestinians in Gaza.

Sheba established, with Friends of the IDF, the “Returning to Life” National Centre for Victims of Mental Trauma, delivering innovative mental care that helps veterans and their families return to life.’ Director General of Sheba Medical Centre Yitshak Kreiss, an Israeli physician who served in the IDF for 25 years, has pursued links with Australia on several recent visits.

St Vincent’s Hospital, Melbourne, is an international partner of the Sheba Medical Centre, with the Victorian State Government, Invest Victoria, NSW Health, Monash Health, Monash University, Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, and Silverchain listed as Australian partners. Australian Israeli businessman Frank Lowy is a major donor to Sheba, funding a new ICU unit in 2023.

Australian Friends of Sheba (AFS) fundraises for Sheba. AFS CEO is IDF veteran, Idan Goldberger, who previously headed the United Israel Appeal in Australia. University of Melbourne Professor Michael Hofman is a Director of AFS and also a clinician with the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre.

He has worked with AFS on initiatives, including a 2022 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to foster scientific exchange and clinical trials between Peter MacCallum and Sheba. Dr Jeffrey Rosenfeld, Senior Neurosurgeon, Alfred Hospital and Emeritus Professor of Surgery at Monash University is a an AFS Patron.

Gaza health system destruction

In August 2025, a UN Commission of Inquiry found that the Israel Defence Force (IDF) had carried out “targeted destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system” and that this amounted to  “medicide”.

The Commissioners, who included Australian international lawyer Chris Sidoti, found that Israel deliberately attacked and starved healthcare workers and hospitals to wipe out medical care in Gaza. UN bodies issued directives to Third States not to support or aid Israel’s conduct of genocide, including institutions directly contributing to Israel’s war effort.

The medicide is ongoing.

Israel has damaged and destroyed 94% of Gaza”s hospitals. At least 1,722 healthcare workers have been killed in Gaza, and Israel has detained hundreds of Palestinian health workers, including senior doctors, without charge. There is extensive evidence that they have been tortured, beaten and starved.

The Israeli government refuses to allow an estimated 20,000 severely injured Gazans access to treatment in Israel or in Palestinian hospitals in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. This means Palestinians must seek treatment elsewhere. Only a handful exited Gaza before Israel again closed the Rafah crossing and other exits when the current war began.

Human Rights organisations and some Israeli doctors warn that “every day of delay in evacuating patients directly endangers their lives”. They have petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court to allow Gazan patients treatment in Palestinian hospitals in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, but the case won’t be heard until July, and even if successful, it will not apply to Israeli hospitals.

Healthcare workers united

Two years ago, an Australian healthcare workers’ petition was launched calling on the Government to support actions that addressed the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. It’s been signed by over 43,000 health professionals and was mentioned in the NSW parliament by Greens MLC Dr Amanda Cohn.

Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand Doctors for Palestine have lobbied consistently and criticised Australian and New Zealand medical colleges for their lack of leadership in relation to Israel’s human rights breaches. This open letter, signed by over 700 paediatric fellows and trainees, was sent to the Royal Australasian College of Physicians’ (RACP) Paediatrics & Child Health Division (PCHD) in July 2025.

Meanwhile, as the Knesset debates draconian laws regarding death sentences for Palestinian ‘prisoners’,

One hundred Israeli doctors have pledged to carry out executions.

Government partnerships

Then Acting Secretary of NSW Health, Susan Pearce and Mark Sofer, former Israeli Ambassador to Australia, signed a Declaration of Intent in 2019 between NSW Health and Israel’s Ministry of Health to promote bilateral cooperation between the two parties in health and medicine. 

Shortly afterwards, the Australian-Israel Chamber of Commerce (AICC) sent a trade mission to Israel, which Sofer declared as “a milestone in the burgeoning relations between Israel and New South Wales, which provides the perfect foundation for the upcoming visit of Premier Berejiklian to Israel next year.”

Before the Liberal government lost office in 2023, the Minister for Health, Brad Hazzard, signed a 5-year MOU with Sheba Centre and NSW Health, claiming its relationship with Sheba would bolster the strategic relationship with Israel. In 2024, NSW Health Minister Ryan Park met with Sheba representatives to discuss the MOU. 

In response to questions from MWM, a spokesperson for NSW Health said that NSW Health collaborates with health systems and organisations around the world, and the Israel MOU is in line with advice received by the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs. MWM could not identify any similar partnerships, so we asked NSW Health to identify them. We received no reply.

Last year, Greens MP Jenny Leong asked Park what steps NSW Health had undertaken to ensure that Sheba had no ties to the Israel Defence Forces or to any enterprises identified by the UN as being participants in Israel’s occupation of Palestinian Territories, which include Gaza.

In September 2025, Dr Amanda Cohn Greens MLC wrote to NSW Health Minister Park calling for the termination of the MOU. She told MWM, “NSW Health has told me that there have been no tangible undertakings through its agreement with the Sheba Medical Centre. 

This purely symbolic partnership is only serving Israel’s image, not patients here or overseas.

Meanwhile, the AICC has continued to stage its annual Health Innovation Program to which PM Anthony Albanese sent a message of support in 2022. In 2024, Pearce, along with the CEO of St. Vincent’s Health, hosted the Health Innovation Program with Israel-based health experts, including those from Sheba and Hadassah hospitals and digital health start-up, Datos, which partners with the Victorian government’s Northern Health.

Monash University, which has had strong research links with Israel since 2018, is investing $1.5 million in the first three years of its 2023 MOU with Sheba Medical Centre. The partnership focuses on ‘new medical technology, digital health innovations and models of care and facilitates their commercialisation, manufacture and adoption in health service environments’.

The Victorian state government, Monash University, Monash Health, Silverchain and the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre have partnered with Sheba to launch an Accelerate, Redesign, Collaborate (ARC) Innovation Centre, which will be one of the global networks that the Sheba ARC Innovation Centre in Israel promotes. Melbourne hosted the inaugural ARC Asia Summit in March 2025. Sheba ARC has some 140 private start-up companies in its fold, which it claims will benefit from its global outreach.

The ARC aims are to create a hub for digital health innovation to ‘grow Victoria’s capabilities in healthcare outcomes, commercialisation, and entrepreneurship’. But as Greens MP Dr Tim Read stated when raising concerns about the ARC/ APAC Summit held in Melbourne in March 2025, the push to promote Israel as a key hi-tech medical innovator rings hollow in light of Israel’s criminal actions against Gaza’s health system.

The 2023 collaboration between Sheba’s ARC Centre, Sheba Medical Centre and Silverchain, a leading Australian provider of complex home care, aims to ‘use Israeli technology to transform digital and remote home care services in Australia’.

Charity support

Australia/Israel Medical Research (AUSiMED), a non-profit organisation committed to collaborations between Australia and Israel, currently supports a partnership to train more critical care doctors for Israel. Its Seconds Save Lives appeal is supporting (Israeli) civilians and military personnel injured since 2023. Last year,

Hadassah Australia raised $6.6m to support the Hadassah Medical Organisation in Israel.  

Israel’s 2025 Gandel Rehabilitation Centre at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem is jointly funded by the Israeli government, Hadassah Australia and the Gandel Foundation. It primarily treats wounded Israeli soldiers. Professor Yoram Weiss, Director General, Hadassah Medical Organization commented:

“The first patients – including heroes and heroines to whom we owe a huge debt of gratitude – can now begin their journey back to full health with the help of a specially designed department with advanced rehabilitation equipment and systems built and installed especially for them.” 

Hadassah boasts an underground medical complex, as does Sheba, and while both champion their special contributions to Operation Roaring Lion, Palestinians are left to die in Gaza, while Israel has killed more than thirty Lebanese medical workers in recent weeks.

https://michaelwest.com.au/medicide-australian-healthcares-tight-links-israel-despite-gaza/

 

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

 

ISRAEL WAR IN IRAN, LEBANON AND GAZA MAKE BONDI LOOK LIKE A SUNDAY PICNIC... 

 

OUR HEARTS BLEED FOR ALL THE FAMILIES AND COMMUNITIES AFFECTED BY THE TRAGIC ACT OF TERRORISM AT BONDI.
THE JEWISH COMMUNITY IN AUSTRALIA DESERVE AS MUCH PEACE AS ALL THE PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD.

AND WE MEAN IT.

HYPOCRISY ISN’T ONE OF THE SINS OF THE TEN COMMANDMENTS.

HENCE ITS POPULARITY IN THE ABRAHAMIC TRADITIONS…

 

 

war-crazed.....

 

Eugene Doyle,  Chas Freeman

Iran war may accelerate a new Middle East security order

 

The war on Iran may have far-reaching consequences for Gulf security, regional alliances and the future of the US presence in the Middle East. Eugene Doyle talks with former US Ambassador Chas Freeman, to try and see the road ahead.

Whether intended or unintended, the US and Israel are severely damaging the economies of the Gulf States. By attacking Iran, they knew full well what the Iranians would do in response – after all, Iran had warned that any further attack on it would lead to a regional war.

Are we witnessing a brazen plan to destroy both Iran and seriously weaken the Gulf States, using Iran as a weapon to do the latter? Could this be a Machiavellian plan to throw a cluster bomb into The Great Muslim Reconciliation between the Sunni states and Shia Iran? Will the war halt or accelerate the project to create an Islamic NATO which is based around last year’s Saudi-Pakistani defence pact? The Saudis have the dollars; the Pakistanis have the nukes and the troops.

The permanent isolation of Iran was the centrepiece of the US-promoted Abraham Accords – designed to bring the Israeli regime into the circle of love and keep Iran out in the cold. Anything that runs counter to this is a threat. The war comes at a time when Iran and the Gulf States had taken major steps to mend fences after decades of hostility.

The murder of top Iranian General Qassem Soleimani on orders of Donald Trump in 2020 was supposed to kill off a diplomatic rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Soleimani and other officials were killed in a US missile strike at Baghdad airport without the permission of or notification to the Iraqi government. He was, according to Iranian, Saudi and Iraqi sources, including Iraqi PM Adil Abdul-Mahdi, heading for a meeting with his Saudi counterpart to broker a peace deal. The assassination was successful but the US attempt to kill off the peace process failed.

US sabotages diplomacy

A week before the US and Israel launched their latest attack, Egypt and Iran announced that they had agreed to fully restore diplomatic relations and exchange ambassadors. It was the latest in a series of such moves to bring Iran in from the cold.

UAE opened an embassy in Tehran in 2022 which rattled the Pentagon. Under the aegis of China, a historic reopening of embassies occurred between Tehran and Riyadh (Saudi Arabia) in 2023, and was swiftly followed by Abu Dhabi and other Muslim states. The long cruel stranglehold the US had placed on Iran since the 1979 overthrow of US client and autocrat Shah Reza Pahlavi was starting to loosen. Iran’s economy could at last recover – which would improve life for millions of Iranians. This was the last thing the sanctions-crazed USA wanted.

The Israeli attack on Doha

The Israeli attack on Doha on 9 September 2025 will likely be seen as a watershed moment for the Arab states. The target was Hamas negotiators including Khaled Mashal, chairman of the Hamas Political Bureau, adding to a growing list of attacks on negotiators by (let’s be honest) the ever-perfidious Israelis and Americans.

Among the victims were Qatari security personnel and civilians. Qatar correctly decried it as state terrorism. The Arabs took note: the US didn’t stop the attack from happening and deployed no interceptors despite being Qatar’s security guarantor.

As the Middle East Institute pointed out shortly after, “Within days of the Israeli strike, [Pakistan’s] Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif visited Doha in a show of solidarity. Seizing the crisis as an opportunity to elevate Pakistan’s strategic presence in the Gulf and the wider Middle East, its government voiced support for the proposed formation of a joint Arab-Islamic security force.”

The quickly signed Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement (SMDA) got a lot of attention in West Asia and was soon dubbed an ‘Islamic NATO’ – an alliance that could one day replace American boots on the ground. The Gulf States were also slowly coming to the realisation that America was unreliable, Israel was a genuine threat and Iran might be useful as a counterbalance to the US and Israel. A Pakistani nuclear shield and conventional military backup was being discussed as far away as Ankara; there were even whispers Iran might be invited to join.

Now, back to that question of whether the US is, through its war on Iran, deliberately weakening the Gulf States as part of a strategy to keep the Muslim world divided. I asked US Ambassador (ret) Chas Freeman and he replied, “I think you give far too much credit to the United States, and more particularly, to Israel, in terms of devious planning to do these things in the Gulf.”

“We’re actually pretty stupid and clumsy at what we do. Look at what we’re doing with the Peshmerga and the Kurds. How stupid do you have to be to do that?”

Ambassador Freeman highlighted what has been a recurring cycle in US foreign policy – strategic betrayal – in which it uses groups like the Kurdish Peshmerga or the freshly-minted Coalition of Political Forces of Iranian Kurdistan (CPFIK) to attack US enemies only to throw them under the bus the moment they have served their purpose. The CIA and the White House have tried to lure the Iranian Kurds into the current battle, Trump blurting out how “wonderful” it would be and how the map of Iran would be redrawn. This will only fuel Iranian nationalism.

Ambassador Freeman is among those who believe that the US-Israeli defence shield is running low on interceptors and Iran could strike back hard in the coming weeks. He also surmises that the Iranians will have secretly signalled to the Gulf States that a condition of the war ending – if Iran gets to set the terms – will be the removal of all US military from the Gulf States. None of us can say with certainty what the respective breaking points for the belligerents are but I certainly believe Iran is very far from out of the fight that the US and Israel has forced on them.

“Prior to the US-Israeli attack, the Gulf Arabs were moving –  in their usual incoherent and inchoate way – toward some kind of coalition with Iran to balance Israeli military hegemony in the region,” Ambassador Freeman told me.

“Now Israel and the United States have given an opening to Iran to pursue its long term objective, which is to remove the American presence from the Gulf. Iran has turned a vicious attack on it into a strategic opportunity to force the Gulf States to do a cost-benefit analysis.”

Chas Freeman is probably right: the US didn’t intend to shatter the Gulf States as one of its war aims. That leaves the more plausible explanation: the Americans and Israelis are simply demented and war-crazed.

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2026/03/will-israel-and-the-us-wreck-the-gulf-states-along-with-iran/

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.