Israeli doctor compared killing Palestinians in Gaza to 'eliminating cockroaches'
An Israeli doctor serving as an army reservist has compared killing people in Gaza to “eliminating cockroaches” in a post on social media.
Writing on X on Sunday, Sabo Amos, who works as a surgeon in Israel’s public healthcare system, said he had volunteered to take part in “eliminations” after his battalion had killed “dozens of terrorists” the previous day.
Amos said he had requested to take part in operations “within the framework of preventative medicine”, but said another doctor had suggested his involvement was a matter of “public health”.
“On second thought, he’s right. After all, we’re talking about eliminating cockroaches and other loathsome insects,” Amos wrote in the now deleted post.
Later on Sunday, he posted an image which he said showed Israeli soldiers participating in an afternoon Jewish prayer service in a mosque in northern Gaza.
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“Every few minutes, machine gun fire or tank shells hit Gaza. Grind them,” he wrote.
Amos previously called for Gaza to be “erased” in a post on X in August 2024.
“There are no uninvolved people there,” he wrote.
Amos works for Maccabi Healthcare Services, one of Israel’s main public healthcare providers, which offers services to all Israeli nationals, including Palestinian citizens of Israel.
According to Maccabi’s website, he is based in a mixed city in northern Israel with a large Palestinian population.
MEE has contacted Maccabi Healthcare Services for comment.
A Palestinian doctor working in the public healthcare system in Israel, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told MEE he was not surprised by Amos’s comments.
He recalled how some doctors in the hospital where he worked had celebrated when a hospital in Gaza had been bombed, and had called for Gaza to be erased, and for the people to be starved.
“I’ve reached a point in these hospitals where I’ve started to wonder what kind of view someone has of medicine that pushes them to think like that,” he said.
“It cannot be the perspective of a human being, a doctor, who has taken an oath."
'Occupation of medicine'
He was concerned, he added, at the abuses that doctors and medical staff who had been called up by the army may have been involved in, citing the torture and mistreatment of Palestinians in Israeli detention.
"I’m surrounded by criminals - either from a humanitarian standpoint or a medical one. It's a sort of occupation of medicine that forces us to erase our own identity and hide our feelings in these hospitals toward the people of Gaza.”
Ghada Majadli, a researcher and policy analyst at the Al-Shabaka think tank, who focuses on Palestinian health and human rights, said Amos’s posts revealed the growing militarisation of Israel’s healthcare system.
“Doctors are moving between clinics and the battlefield, as if medical and military roles are interchangeable,” Majadli told MEE.
“When medical professionals adopt the language and tools of war, they fundamentally betray the ethical principles of medicine, which centre on care, neutrality, and the preservation of life.”
She said Israel’s healthcare system had channelled significant resources in support of the war in Gaza and had failed to oppose attacks on hospitals and the destruction of medical infrastructure, or the denial of food and aid which has pushed the population to the brink of starvation.
Amos’s posts were made as Palestinians across Gaza faced a renewed Israeli assault that killed at least 144 people on Sunday and has killed more than 50 already on Monday.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed that Israel will take “full control” of Gaza, while his far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, said on Monday that Israel is “destroying everything that is left” in Gaza.
Smotrich said: “We are conquering, cleansing, and remaining in Gaza until Hamas is destroyed.”
Israel's attacks targeting hospitals and other healthcare infrastructure have been widely condemned by international organisations attempting to support medical care for Palestinians in Gaza where more than 52,000 people have been killed since the start of the war in October 2023.
On Sunday, the Palestinian health ministry said that all hospitals in northern Gaza are now out of action and accused Israel of laying siege to the Indonesian Hospital in Beit Lahia.
Earlier this month, British charity Medical Aid for Palestinians said more than 1,400 healthcare workers had been killed in Gaza and accused Israel of waging a "war on healthcare".
Amos’s remarks were condemned on Monday by the Israeli Medical Association which said it was looking into a number of complaints.
“The Ethics Bureau strongly condemns calls for doctors to kill in the name of medicine and sees a need to emphasise that the doctor's role, in whatever setting he operates, is to save lives and cure patients,” it said in a statement.
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