The Campaigns Targeting Canadian Doctors Who Want to Discuss the Health Crisis in Gaza
Sid Shniad
Press Progress September 18, 2025
The Campaigns Targeting Canadian Doctors Who Want to Discuss the Health Crisis in Gaza
A conference on refugee healthcare lost sponsors, and a talk for employees at Canada's public health agency was cancelled, after Palestine advocates were branded as "antisemitic"
Canada’s only refugee health conference saw sponsors pull out and registrations at their lowest levels ever, after it was accused of supporting antisemitism for featuring Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, among the planned speakers.
“This year, because we included Palestine, one of the most central and neglected refugee populations, we have faced unprecedented attacks,” Dr. Anna Banerji said in the run-up to the event.
Banerji is a pediatrician who treats refugee children in Toronto. Since 2009, she has organized the North American Refugee Health Conference, which this year included a lineup of high-profile speakers, like Dr. Gabor Maté, and took place in Niagara Falls from Sept. 11–13.
But organizers say that putting on this year’s event involved challenges like never before, after the pro-Israel advocacy organization HonestReporting Canada (HRC) described the conference as planning to host “peddlers of hateful anti-Israel and anti-Jewish propaganda.”
“Sponsors have withdrawn and speakers have been threatened,” said Banerji. “A few have been afraid to participate, but most have had the moral courage to continue.”
At least 1.9 million Palestinians are refugees within Gaza, after nearly two years of what a UN inquiry determined this week has been a genocide carried out by Israel; the World Health Organization estimates about 94 per cent of hospitals in the Gaza strip have been damaged or destroyed by Israeli strikes; at least 1,400 healthcare workers have been killed during the offensive; and the IPC has confirmed Gaza is facing famine as Israel continues to block life-saving aid from entering.
Yet in Canada, doctors trying to discuss the healthcare crisis unfolding in Gaza continue to face pressure campaigns laced with antisemitism allegations, in many cases pointing to posts by HonestReporting Canada, an organization that aims to enlist its supporters in “a digital army for Israel.”
One of the other conference speakers labelled “antisemitic” by HonestReporting was Dr. Yipeng Ge, a Canadian physician who volunteered as a medic in Gaza last year.
In December, Ge was scheduled to give a talk on “structural racism in Global Health Crises” to employees at the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), but after months of planning, the presentation was cancelled minutes before it was set to begin.
Ge subsequently filed an access-to-information request and found out why: some employees at PHAC had complained about Ge, citing his social media containing pro-Palestine content as well as HonestReporting Canada’s articles about him.
“I’ve lost track of the number of articles that have been written to smear me and attack me,” Ge said.
UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese made a virtual appearance at the North American Refugee Health Conference to deliver the closing plenary on Sept. 13 alongside Michael Lynk. (Photo courtesy Dr. Anna Banerji)
HonestReporting did not respond to a request for comment.
Since the start of Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, doctors and medical students across Canada have been suspended, disciplined, doxxed and surveilled for signing petitions and posting pro-Palestine content on social media.
Ge himself was suspended from his medical residency at the University of Ottawa in 2023 for posting about Palestine on social media, and then refused to return when the university offered to reinstate him months later.
Mental health charity, journal publisher pull out of conference
Normally, Banerji said, the refugee health conference draws 400 to 600 attendees, but it only had about 230 paid registrations this year.
“Refugees are the most vulnerable population in the world, and our conference discusses the continuum of refugee health,” Banerji said. “We develop best practices in refugee health and, inherently, we discuss places of conflict and displacement.”
The backlash to the conference started with an April post on HonestReporting Canada, in which its executive director, Mike Fegelman, wrote it was “inconceivable” that Ge and Albanese “would be given a platform to spew their bile.”
After leaving his residency at the University of Ottawa, Ge went to Gaza to volunteer as a medic in February 2024. He returned to Canada with a “harrowing” account of starving, malnourished children and a healthcare system left without the basics, like antibiotics to treat infections, as lines of aid trucks waited outside Rafah with desperately needed supplies but were blocked by Israel from entering Gaza.
Ge’s firsthand testimony was collected by lawyers and researchers tasked with preparing reports with evidence of Israeli war crimes for bodies like the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice and Scotland Yard. He has since been a staunch pro-Palestine advocate, regularly calling for Canada to sanction Israel.
Albanese, as an independent human rights expert appointed by the UN to monitor rights violations in occupied Palestine, has long called out Israel’s goal of ethnic cleansing in Gaza. As a result, the Trump administration banned her from entering the U.S.
After nearly two years of Israel’s livestreamed bombing and starvation campaign, the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory declared on Tuesday what Albanese, Ge and experts around the world have been saying for over a year: that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.
In the wake of the HRC post about Albanese and Ge’s involvement in the refugee health conference, irate emails about the two speakers were sent to the federal government, the organizers of the event and to other speakers at the conference.
One email addressed to government officials like Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand urged the Canadian government to “revoke any visa or entry clearance” granted to Albanese — she ultimately attended virtually — and encouraged the Mental Health Commission of Canada (MHCC) to pull its sponsorship.
The MHCC, a charity that develops programs around mental health, did subsequently bow out of a planned presentation. It did not respond to questions from PressProgress. But in a newsletter on Aug. 22, a group called Doctors Against Racism and Antisemitism (DARA) took credit for the commission rescinding its involvement, citing the move as a response to DARA’s advocacy against Albanese’s participation.
In another email seen by PressProgress, a University of Toronto public health professor withdrew from the conference, citing “the very public and extreme anti-Semitic and pro-Hamas perspectives,” of Ge, Albanese and her predecessor, Canadian law professor Michael Lynk, who also spoke at the conference. She then went on to email another presenter at the conference about her decision.
“I presume you are writing me because I am also Jewish,” the presenter replied.
“I do not share your perspective on the speakers you caricature, or the character of the conference itself.”
In late August, a physician who was among the organizers of the conference wrote to his colleagues to share his own experience.
“I have been targeted with requests, pressure to withdraw from the NARHC conference. I was told that through my participation I would be supporting antisemitism and brutality against Israel and Jewish peoples,” he wrote. “The request came through a University of Toronto teaching hospital staff.”
“For me, I don’t give a damn about reputation on this matter. But I do care strongly about efforts to silence voices.”
But others did withdraw.
Emails show academic-journal publisher MDPI pulled thousands of dollars in sponsorship from the conference in July “due to unforeseen circumstances.” A spokesperson for MDPI said they pulled their sponsorship due to “budgetary constraints.”
From left: presenters Ali Abdiwahab Adan, Nhial Deng, Michael Lynk and Dr. Yipeng Ge at the North American Refugee Health Conference in Niagara Falls on Sept. 13 (via Ge’s X).
Organizers say the University Health Network (UHN) also stopped advertising the conference as they had in previous years.
In response to questions from PressProgress, a spokesperson for UHN said that in spring 2025, the organization decided to stop advertising events that weren’t directly hosted by UHN “following repeated situations where third-party events were being confused as UHN-affiliated events.”
According to Banerji, this change was made right after HonestReporting Canada’s April post.
Talk for Public Health Agency employees postponed indefinitely
About a month after Dr. Yipeng Ge filed his access-to-information request to the Public Health Agency of Canada in February 2025, he opened his inbox to find a 91-page document that contained emails and screenshots of internal Microsoft Teams messages about his recently-cancelled talk.
The records, which Ge shared with PressProgress, show he was initially invited when a number of racialized employees within PHAC expressed interest in Ge presenting a talk about how “public health intersects with racialization in terms of producing public health crises in areas of conflict.”
There were several rounds of scheduling back-and-forth in the months leading up to the virtual talk set for December and, according to Ge, PHAC managers informed him that his initial presentation needed changes.
“Basically I was given the direction [that] things like Zionism, things like genocide, things like colonialism, cannot be mentioned,” Ge told PressProgress.
“Certain sections were completely taken out, including a slide explicitly directing people towards the Palestinian [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions] campaign as well as the arms-embargo campaign.”
Ge agreed to the changes, so that “at least we’re talking about Gaza; at least there’s some kind of visibility,” he said.
But the event was cancelled minutes before it was scheduled to begin. After months of wondering why, Ge’s access-to-information request revealed the reason.
An internal Teams message shows a director at PHAC, in answering colleagues’ questions about why the event was cancelled, citing specific complaints about Ge’s social media, which featured content such as a sign reading “From the rivers [sic] to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
The director wrote that they had received emails about Ge expressing concern that “the event may become a platform for expressing partisan, political, biased views, or statements that are anti-Semitic.”
The list of examples she cited included an HonestReporting Canada post about Ge that describes “From the river to the sea” as a “genocidal proclamation” against Israel. The director also noted a video in which Ge accused the Canadian government of “ongoing complicity in genocide.”
An excerpt from a conversation between employees at the Public Health Agency of Canada that was disclosed to Dr. Yipeng Ge in response to an access-to-information request.
In a statement to PressProgress, a spokesperson for the agency said simply that, “Following internal consultation, the Public Health Agency of Canada decided not to proceed with the event.”
Nearly two years into the genocide, Ge said he remembers the words of Toni Morrison when faced with attempts to “silence” him: “The very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work.”
He said he continues to learn how people who “do not want to see or hear the truth about Palestine and the ongoing genocide” will go to “extreme lengths of threatening people’s reputation, livelihoods, careers and so much more.”
“They do this by weaponizing antisemitism and equating it with anti-Zionism in order to silence narratives that are critical of Israel.”