Selective Courage in Medicine
When a major Melbourne hospital cancelled a panel on children in war, it claimed the event posed a risk to staff safety. That explanation insults both staff and the public. The real risk was not physical harm but discomfort: the unease of having to speak honestly about Gaza.
I was ten when Iraq invaded Kuwait. The threat of a chemical attack hung over us constantly. Saddam Hussein had already used mustard gas and nerve agents like sarin and tabun against Iran and against Kurdish civilians in Halabja, and many feared he would do so again. My parents showed us what to do if it came. My brother, sister, and I were to squeeze into a bathtub filled with water, drape wet towels across our faces, and wait. The belief was that the water would offer some protection, preventing the chemicals from dissolving. I remember asking where my parents would be. They held my gaze, steady and unflinching, and said only, “Don’t worry.” Then came the instruction that stayed with me: I was to do everything I could to protect my brother and sister. It was only years later that I understood they were preparing us to survive without them.
The children of Gaza live in that state permanently. Their trauma is not a memory but a baseline condition. Malnutrition, shrapnel wounds, and psychological scars are the daily caseload of any doctor who would treat them, if treatment were possible.
So why do hospitals in safe and wealthy nations recoil from even discussing their plight? Other atrocities are easier to name. Rwanda, Bosnia, the Holocaust, these can be mourned with solemnity precisely because they cost us nothing in the present. They carry degrees of separation that buffer professional networks and social circles. Gaza does not. Acknowledging its suffering risks upsetting colleagues, donors, or dinner-table companions. The silence is not born of neutrality, but of fear.
As a physician of Palestinian ancestry, I see this as both personal and professional betrayal. In emergency medicine, we do not turn away from the difficult patient. We do not choose whose wounds to suture or whose pain to validate based on convenience. We are trained to meet suffering with honesty, even when it makes us uncomfortable. To cancel a panel on children in war is not an act of safety but of cowardice. Hospitals that pride themselves on confronting suffering at the bedside are choosing to avert their eyes when the suffering is political.
Silence is not neutral. It is complicity disguised as caution. By invoking “staff safety,” institutions reframe moral avoidance as an operational necessity. Yet the real danger lies in what such evasions normalise: a culture where speaking about the suffering of Palestinian children is treated as more hazardous than their actual deaths.
This does not require choosing sides. It requires consistency. One can condemn Hamas’s atrocities and still demand that Palestinian children not be starved, bombed, or erased from the public conversation. One can empathise with Israeli trauma while insisting that the lives of Gaza’s children deserve equal recognition. To suppress that discussion is to declare, silently but unmistakably, that some children matter less.
Doctors, more than most, know better. We understand what shrapnel does to a child’s body, what malnutrition does to developing organs, what relentless fear does to a growing mind. We know that trauma does not dissipate when conversation is cancelled.
History will not remember the emails that justified these decisions. It will remember who found the courage to speak when it was costly, and who hid in silence. Children in war do not have the luxury of silence. Neither should we.
