NYC nurse fired after calling Gaza war ‘genocide’ during award acceptance speech
A nurse at a New York hospital won an award for compassion from her employers — and then got fired for using her acceptance speech to accuse Israel of committing “genocide” in Gaza.
Palestinian American labor and delivery nurse Hesen Jabr, 34,delivered the fiery remarks as she was being honored earlier this month by NYU Langone Health for her efforts in caring for mothers grieving lost babies.
“It pains me to see the women from my country going through unimaginable losses themselves during the current genocide in Gaza,” she said during her May 7 acceptance speech, according to a video she posted on social media.
“This award is deeply personal to me for those reasons,” Jabr said in her brief remarks, during which she twice used the word “genocide” to describe the Israeli war.
Jabr says she was “dragged” into a meeting with NYU Langone’s president and vice president of nursing on her first day back to work after the ceremony, on May 22.
She said in an online posting that the meeting was called to “discuss how I ‘put others at risk’ and ‘ruined the ceremony’ and ‘offended people’ because a small part of my speech was a tribute towards the grieving mothers in our country.”
Near the end of her shift, however, Jabr was again “dragged” into an office where the hospital’s director of resources, Austin Bender, read her termination letter before she was escorted off the premises by a plainclothes cop, her post said.
In a follow-up post, Jabr took aim at the medical center, lobbing a number of accusations.
In one, she claimed a labor and delivery doctor at the hospital once “pulled [her] aside” in a delivery room as a patient who had just given birth was being stitched up to scold her, allegedly telling her that her people “were the cause of the current bombardment that was happening to them at the time.”
The Post reached out to Jabr by phone and left a voicemail but did not immediately hear back.
NYU Langone spokesman Steve Ritea said in a statement that Jabr was “warned” in December following a “previous incident” and had been admonished “not to bring her views on this divisive and charged issue into the workplace.”
He did not elaborate on the details of the alleged “previous incident,” but because of her failure to heed that warning at the award ceremony, Ritea said, “Jabr is no longer an NYU Langone employee.”
NYU would also not comment on Jabr’s accusations of mistreatment by hospital staff.
