A New York City doctor has been fired after posting “Long Live Hamas & Hezbollah” online and making statements denying atrocities by the militant groups. Lila Abassi, an assistant professor of medicine at Mount Sinai’s Upper East Side hospital, was let go earlier this month after a probe into her controversial social media activity, a hospital spokesperson confirmed to The NY Post.
Hamas is a Palestinian militant group that controls Gaza, while Hezbollah is an Iran-backed militant group based in Lebanon. Both are labelled terrorist organisations by the US, Israel, and others.
In a series of posts, Ms Abassi, 46, allegedly praised Hamas as “noble resistance and freedom fighters,” called the Israeli army a “plague,” accused Israel of “slaughtering babies,” and dismissed reports of sexual violence during the October 7, 2023.
“Please show me actual rape video,” she wrote in a Facebook doctors’ group, using the pseudonym “Kluver Bucy,” a reference to a rare neurological disorder. She also claimed Israel had “massacr[ed] more people on 10/7 than [were] killed by Hamas.”
Abassi is a 2011 graduate of St. George’s University School of Medicine who later completed her residency at SUNY Downstate. Her firing came after weeks of pressure from New York City Councilwoman Inna Vernikov (R-Brooklyn), who argued that deleting her social media account was not enough.
“Our most basic expectation of doctors is that they will perform their duties in an unbiased manner – especially a doctor serving a city as ethnically and religiously diverse as ours,” Ms Vernikov told The Post.
Ms Abassi’s views were already known in medical circles. “She’s known as one of the more outspoken and egregiously antisemitic physicians in the community,” a fellow Mount Sinai doctor told The NY Post.
Physicians Against Antisemitism, a watchdog group that exposed Ms Abassi’s posts, said, “No longer will any Jewish patient feel confident that they will receive safe care from that individual, and by extension, at the facility that employs them.”