In the Media

Australian Jewish News – 15 August 2024

Muhammad Al-Wadiya was a physiotherapist working for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), also known as Doctors Without Borders, the international medical aid organisation. He was also a rocket, electronics and chemistry expert for the listed terrorist organisation Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). It was in the latter capacity that he was killed by an Israeli airstrike on June 25.

The initial reaction of MSF was to condemn the killing and reflexively deny his PIJ role. Following the IDF releasing conclusive proof of his role, the organisation said it was “deeply concerned by these allegations and is taking them very seriously” and “would never knowingly employ people engaging in military activity.”

However, this is not the first instance of MSF failing to vet members for terrorism links. MSF has repeatedly employed individuals from, worked with, and even funded organisations linked to, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), another terrorist organisation.

MSF’s treatment of the Muhammad Al-Wadiya incident is emblematic of its troubling broader politicisation, which includes overt anti-Israel activism over many years that is in no way related to its core humanitarian aid mission. MSF and its officials have a history of such anti-Israel advocacy. This includes an article published in Al Jazeera – and republished by MSF – by Jehan Bseiso, the then executive director of MSF-Lebanon, and Jonathan Whittall, founding director of the MSF analysis department, in 2021, in which they implicitly called for Israel’s destruction.

The article referred to a “more than 70 years long” occupation – that is, the establishment of Israel in 1948 – and concluded with the following sentence: “MSF will continue treating the wounds of this violence, but the cure for Palestinian suffering will only come with the end of settler colonialism and apartheid.” The latter terms are code for the end of the liberal democratic state of modern Israel. There are numerous similarly radical statements from MSF officials over recent years.

Every NGO working in Gaza understands that Hamas is a totalitarian regime, meaning every aspect of society, including healthcare, involves working by, with and through its regime, with all the dire moral and security implications that entails. Yet MSF engages with Hamas as the ruling health authority and then it is  complicit with terrorists.

The political advocacy, lack of vetting of terrorists and additional terrorism apologia fundamentally undermine the good work that MSF does. These issues could also very well lead to MSF criminal culpability as well as the loss of its charity status.

MSF staff and the organisation as a whole have failed to speak up about the well-known phenomenon of Hamas using medical facilities for military purposes. Many MSF staff in Gaza are locals and, like them, overseas volunteer MSF doctors are co-opted and do not speak out because they wish to continue their work in Gaza’s hospitals.

However, silence is not in the best interests of patients’ whose lives are endangered by use of hospitals as military bases, because the hospitals thereby lose their status as protected facilities under the laws of war.

Moreover, MSF doctors’ covering up of Hamas’ crimes is itself commission of a complicit aiding and abetting crime, known as concealment or failure to disclose a crime. These crimes are prohibited under Australian law even if committed overseas.

The concealing silence of MSF doctors and staff enables further terrorist crimes. Not only individual doctors, but also MSF’s leadership, are implicated. The seeming inability of MSF to draw attention, even after the fact, to these abuses of otherwise protected facilities, particularly even as other independent volunteer doctors have done so, is further evidence of an organisation compromised by its deal with the devils running Gaza.

Another legal liability risked by the blatant anti-Israel political lobbying conducted by MSF is to its tax-deductible charity registration. Charity laws that enable tax-deductibility of donations may be violated when a registered charity digresses into politically partisan lobbying activities. This could potentially result in the revocation of MSF’s charitable status in the jurisdictions in which it fundraises.

The MSF is in acute need of a long-term institutional health plan to remedy its chronically politicised culture. Breaches of organisational ethos as well as administrative and criminal laws must be addressed. Should MSF find itself incapable of curing its systemic politicisation, governments should expose it to administrative audit and even criminal investigations

The first corrective step for MSF to take is to self-diagnose its institutional illness. It can then formulate organisational policies that will remedy its politicisation. In Aesop’s fable, a lame frog claims to be a wonder-working doctor but is taunted by a clever fox: ‘Physician, heal thyself!’. So must it be for Médecins Sans Frontières, which wore a halo but then went rogue.

Greg Rose is a Professor of Law at the University of Wollongong, a Senior Fellow at The Hague Initiative for International Cooperation, and is currently a visiting fellow at the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC).