“Unbridled Brutality” of Israeli “Genocide” Is Denounced at Harvard Public Health Event

Antisemitism Task Force found “bias,” “demonization” from FXB Center

A slide from the October 22, 2025, Harvard webinar.

The François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights is housed within Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. When the center opened in 1993, its original mission was to address the global AIDS crisis, particularly among children mired in poverty, and to bring attention to healthcare crises resulting from political abuse or neglect. Its founder, Dr. Jonathan Mann, was a pioneer in establishing the concept of healthcare as an exigent human right regardless of any nation’s economics or political ideology.

Tucked inside FXB is the Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights (hereafter PPH). While there could be value in a geo-specific program collating data to aid in the allotment of public health funds, this program seems to be yet another Israel-bashing political activist organization hiding inside a university. It’s like a Russian doll: the PPH is nestled inside FXB, which is tucked inside the Chan School, which is a division of Harvard University. From this cozy spot, the PPH is free to ignore the very purpose of a public health program, and instead eagerly advertise and exploit its anti-Israel bias. At PPH, public health gives way to public shaming.

On October 22, the PPH hosted a Zoom conference call to discuss the healthcare situation in Gaza. The title of the presentation, “Understanding Genocide through a Public Health Lens: Perspectives from Gaza,” pre-defined the situation for all attendees: the Gaza War was a genocide, and that was that. The declaration would not be debated. There was an introductory assurance that the presentation was not speaking on behalf of the university, but it was also presented as a webinar of the “FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University.”

Our host introduced her three guests, then all four proceeded to excoriate Israel as committing genocide in Gaza and beyond. Each conveniently forget that FXB’s role is to provide public healthcare analysis rather than legal indictments; that there are available and lucid views contrary to their monolithic condemnation of Israel’s conduct of the war; and that the damning and one-sided statistics they cited to declare Israel as genocidal are unsubstantiated and produced by organizations with longstanding anti-Israel bias (or Israeli sources which overtly favor boycott/divest/sanction strictures against Israel). Isn’t a renowned public health organization mandated to produce high-quality analyses rather than cherry-pick what suits an ideological slant? Come to think of it, why is a public health program housing a division with any political agenda?

The views of our host, Sherene Seikaly, an associate professor of history at UC Santa Barbara (i.e., not a public health official), were clear from the outset: “Israel committed mass murder [in] twenty-four months of unbridled brutality.” The IDF has specifically hunted down and murdered public health workers “since the beginning of the genocide,” she avowed. Along with two other presenters, she never mentioned that the Gaza war erupted specifically from Hamas’s gruesome murder of 1,200 innocents and kidnapping of civilians.

The next speaker, Elisa von Joeden-Forgey, a human rights attorney at the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention (i.e., also not a public health official) offered a more expansive condemnation: Israel was committing a genocide against all Palestinians, not just in Gaza, and this alleged crime began long before October 7, 2023. She assured us that her conclusions resulted from an unassailable “legal analysis,” proven by her organization’s definitional “Eight Techniques of Genocide.” She cited a priest who declared Auschwitz as “a permanent wound on humanity,” equating Israel’s behavior with Nazi Germany’s. She suggested that rather than ask if Palestinians are oppressed, the world should ask “if they are valued.” She did not add a hope that the world would apply this same morally framed query towards Israelis. To her credit, she was the only speaker who mentioned that October 7 was a brutal massacre. But her ongoing tactic was flagrant, to stamp the word “genocide” inside our minds with the false imprimatur of legal verification rather than skewed legal opinion.

Next up came Aseel Aburass, director of the Occupied Palestinian Territory Department, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (who lists a master’s degree after her name, not an MD, MPH, or PhD). She insisted that the IDF targeted and murdered Gaza physicians as well as willfully destroyed major hospitals to thwart medical treatment, and that her organization’s (yes) legal analysis determined that Israel (not the IDF) manufactured excuses to grant itself permission to bomb hospitals, deny aid, and cut electricity—i.e., to destroy what civilizations require to survive. And, she assured us, a ceasefire would not stop indiscriminate IDF killings, plus that Israeli doctors were calling for a refusal to treat Palestinians, and that a ceasefire was actually perilous for Gaza because international pressure might fade in addressing ongoing “apartheid.” She concluded with a plea for the world to force Israel to end the “siege” in East Jerusalem and the West Bank and to make sure that Palestinian leadership would helm Gaza’s rebuilding efforts. She neglected to mention that Hamas defied human rights mandates by housing weapons and fighters in Gaza’s hospitals and did so with the intention of forcing IDF incursions at these sites to elicit worldwide opprobrium against Israel. Nor did she comment on the notoriously widespread and longstanding political corruptions of “Palestinian leadership.”

The final speaker was an actual physician, Dr. Abdulwhhab Abu Alamrain, who narrated stories of surgical amputations on Gaza citizens, including children, often conducted with limited anesthesia. The doctor’s painful front-line observations would have carried greater emotional impact had he not diminished his oration with flagrant diatribes: he attributed every death and injury to Israel’s hateful depravity; he repeatedly—and I mean incessantly—used the word “genocide” as if forewarning viewers not to dare question such a conclusion; and, given the paucity of verifiable data and subsequent analysis of post-war Gaza healthcare statistics, his anecdotes, while distressing, offered outrage over context. The slaughter against Israelis that triggered the war somehow slipped his mind. His claims that the IDF kidnapped doctors, tortured prisoners, and deprived health care to POWs were never backed by data, only insistence. He issued a clarion call for “academic resistance,” i.e., for universities to collectively excoriate and shun Israel. Declaring Israel’s intention to starve Gaza’s entire citizenry, he failed to acknowledge (let alone quantify) the bountiful aid offered by Israel and western nations. “Starvation doesn’t happen in a vacuum,” he proclaimed, insisting on Israel’s intent to murder or deplete every Gaza citizen.

It was time for Q&A. In other words, time to offer prepared answers to biased and presumptive questions. In fact, the questions were irrelevant. The non-answers tell us all. Sheree Seikaly avowed that Israel has induced starvation in Gaza since 2008, omitting that no credible source ever defined life in Gaza from 2008 until the recent war as approaching a dietary crisis, not to mention that Gaza’s headcount grew at a healthy clip in that exact time span.

Elisa von Joeden-Forgey stated that “post-genocide reconciliation is predicated on liberation.” Did she mean the establishment of a Palestinian state or the removal of a Jewish homeland? She added that a tribunal akin to those which addressed historic genocides (e.g., Rwanda) was essential, although it would be easier to prosecute “war crimes against humanity” versus “genocide” because the latter presented a tougher legal hurdle.

Aseel Aburass insisted that the Gaza genocide was the “accumulation of decades of apartheid” caused by the Nakba (the Palestinian term for the “disaster” of losing the 1947-48 war and facing subsequent repercussions), and that Israel was “left off the hook” for its “settler-colonialism” because post-Holocaust decisions were made by colonial powers. Sherene Seikaly seconded this view that the current genocide resulted from “the ongoing Nakba”; however, Dr. Abu Alamrain made the startling declaration that Israel’s anti-Palestinian genocide began before the Nakba.

Finally, almost surprisingly, a question arose about public health: what were possible approaches from the public health community to aid Gaza? This was fielded by Dr. Abu Alamrain, whose response was decidedly un-medical: the good doctor responded that Jerusalem and the West Bank needed to be freed of siege, and that international human rights courts needed to bring criminal justice trials against Israel. How any of this might benefit public health conditions for Gaza’s populace remained a mystery.

That a surgeon repeatedly called for legal actions beggared the unasked question: why was this conference call—one sponsored by a group contained within a public health school—obsessively focused on the legal definition of genocide and so insistent that Israel was guilty of this genocide? And, if politics must be included in their “analysis,” why Hamas wasn’t deemed accountable for triggering the IDF’s mandate to protect its citizens from Hamas’ own promise to kill many many more Israelis? Instead, the word genocide was reiterated, underlined, and italicized ad nauseam, and pointed in only one direction, as if to define Israel’s very existence as a systemic human rights abuse and thereby reframe “resistance” as an understandable—maybe even dutiful—response. But how would any of this “expert” panel’s responses result in public health improvements for Gaza?

Every speaker neglected to mention the following:

• Israel ceded Gaza to its locals in 2005, and that Hamas—whose original charter calls for the elimination of Jews—was their subsequent electoral choice.

• Hamas systematically murders its political rivals, subjugates dissent, and tortures and/or kills dissenters.

• After committing mass murder on October 7, Hamas vowed to repeat this strategy a thousand times more.

• During the war, Hamas hid in tunnels, subjecting its own population to the IDF’s actions.

• Egypt, Jordan, and every Muslim nation refused to shelter the Gaza populace.

• Hamas took hostages; Hamas starved and murdered many of those hostages.

• If the panel insists on a tribunal, shouldn’t Hamas’s legions be subject to trials for “crimes against humanity”?

• Several true genocides are ongoing (Sudan anyone?) and merit a genuine public health concern.

FXB and its parent, the Chan School, are responsible for this anti-Israel propaganda. The April 2025 Final Report of Harvard’s Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias reported that, “Several students raised concerns with the Task Force about these webinars, alleging that some of the featured speakers presented a demonizing view of Israel and Israelis.” The task force report described the FXB webinars about Gaza as “characterized by bias and misinformation,” noting, “The accumulation of dis- and misinformation of this kind about Israel is a form of demonization, and we were told it was experienced as such by Israeli and Jewish members of our campus community.” The task force also noted that students “expressed concern about the proliferation of such events — citing numerous instances at both FXB and the Religion and Public Life (RPL) program at Harvard Divinity School…as indicative of institutional bias and hostility. This sentiment stemmed, in part, from the perceived absence of any perspectives within these programs that offered alternative explanations for Israel’s actions or presented different interpretations of the data.”

When a webinar like this is presented even after students have complained about the series and after a presidential task force has faulted them—and even after Harvard became subject to lawsuits and federal investigations for antisemitism—it raises questions of institutional intent.

The webinar’s one-sided table-pounding would have been offensive had it been hosted by Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government or Harvard Law School, given the absence of thoughtful debate. But a public health program? Is the role of a public health school’s center to offer safe harbor to a coterie of Israel-bashers who slather on biased and allegedly “legal” analysis? All of this was on flagrant display as I watched. FXB and the Chan School are accountable, whether they care or not. Potential donors might wish to send future contributions to public health institutions that remain true to their medical mandates.

Robert L. Friedman spent his working days in the investment profession. At age sixty-three he returned to graduate school, earning a master’s in theological studies at Harvard Divinity School in 2024.