Physicians for Human Rights Israel’s 2025 Annual Impact Report
English | Hebrew | Arabic
China Miéville’s novel The City and the City is set in a single city, home to two hostile societies. The backdrop is a historical memory of an unresolved violent conflict. The imposed solution is training to “unsee”, which has transformed into a genuine unseeing of people, buildings, and activities by “the other side”, even though they share the same physical space.
Is this purely an allegory? Israeli society, backed by international powers, largely conducts itself while morally, politically, and practically ignoring Israel’s crimes in Gaza and the West Bank – barely an hour from the country’s center. Over the past year, we have contended with the question of the impact of our work amid an ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people and in the shadows of powerful forces of active unseeing. The answer is partial and painful, yet also a source of strength. Against invisibilization, cover-up, and fragmentation, and grounded in our unique fusion of medical ethics and human rights, we choose to see: to investigate, demand accountability and justice, push for continuum, and amplify the silenced voices.
The topics covered in our 2025 annual impact report, reflect this struggle. They include efforts to secure visibility—and the right to health—for women and children without legal status in Israel; defending essential services for people experiencing street homelessness; the consistent operation of our West Bank mobile clinic; support of ambulance drivers in the West Bank striving to maintain the flow of emergency care amid military and settler violence; and a struggle, in the face of Israel’s refusal, to renew the passage of patients from Gaza to hospitals in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
We exposed the widespread enforced disappearance of Palestinians in Israeli custody, including the deaths of at least one hundred since October 2023, and attempts to suppress investigations into these deaths. We mitigated the mistreatment of thousands of detained Palestinians, prompting initial steps by the Israel Prison Service to address a Scabies outbreak. Finally, the testimonies we gathered brought to light the stories of hundreds of incarcerated healthcare workers from Gaza, and efforts to push for their release are ongoing.
Moving from unseeing to seeing goes beyond the physical. It is a moral and political call to action. As the residents of Miéville’s not-entirely-imaginary city understood, “you cannot train yourself to successfully and sustainedly unsee”. We have pushed to hasten the moment in which unseeing is no longer sustainable and to bring others with us. We hope you will join too.
