Nurse Fired After Controversial Award Acceptance Speech

A nurse was fired by a New York hospital following a work-related speech in which she claimed Israel’s actions in Gaza in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack represent “genocide.”

New York University Langone Health honored labor and delivery nurse Hesen Jabr this month for the “compassionate care” she provided to mothers who lost their babies, The New York Times reported Tuesday.

However, as she accepted the award, Jabr, who describes herself as a Palestinian Muslim, equated the suffering of the moms she counseled with that of the women in Gaza.

“It pains me to see the women from my country going through unimaginable losses themselves during the current genocide in Gaza,” she said in the May 7 speech, according to the Times. “This award is deeply personal to me for those reasons.”

“Even though I can’t hold their hands and comfort them as they grieve their unborn children and the children they have lost during this genocide, I hope to keep making them proud as I keep representing them here at NYU,” she said.

Leftists and anti-Semites have mischaracterized the military offensive against Hamas in Gaza as “genocide.” Israel declared war on the Islamic terrorist group after it killed about 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and took many others hostage on Oct. 7.

After the award ceremony, Jabr said in an Instagram post, she returned to her job but was called to a meeting with the hospital’s president and vice president.

She claimed she was told her comments “put others at risk” and she “ruined the ceremony.”

After her shift, Jabr said in the post, she was “dragged once again to an office” and was then told she was terminated.

Steve Ritea, a spokesman for NYU Langone, confirmed that she was fired after her speech but said it wasn’t her first offense.

“Hesen Jabr was warned in December, following a previous incident, not to bring her views on this divisive and charged issue into the workplace,” he said in a statement to the Times. “She instead chose not to heed that at a recent employee recognition event that was widely attended by her colleagues, some of whom were upset after her comments.”

“As a result, Jabr is no longer an NYU Langone employee,” Ritea said.

Her comments about Gaza were not a surprise to those who know her. The Times noted that Jabr has been a political activist for most of her life.

As a fifth-grader, she was part of a discrimination lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union after her school principal gave her a Bible.

“This is not my first rodeo,” she told the Times in an interview Tuesday evening.

In social media posts, Jabr complained about “heated political arguments on the labor and delivery floor,” the outlet reported.

“The pure psychological warfare NYU has waged on me as a nurse, Muslim, Palestinian, and woman, has only left me resolute,” she wrote in one Facebook post.