On The Wanted List
Nick King
15 January 2026
Clockwise from top-left: Drs Ali, Kriesels, Abu-Sittah, Aladwan
In December 2024, consultant neurologist Dr Rehiana Ali found herself interim suspended for eighteen months by the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS) in consideration of the risk to 'patient safety or the public’s confidence in doctors'. The ruling was handed down not, however, as one might mistakenly assume, in respect of any clinical concerns involving alleged negligent practice. The decision came after complaints about Dr Ali's social media posts thru' autumn 2024 frankly critical of Israel and the conduct of its military operating in the occupied Palestinian territories.
In September 2025, a complaint was lodged against consultant paediatrician Dr Ellen Kriesels with the MPTS, fashioned broadly around anti-Zionist social media posts and hearsay complaints, but also citing her participation in demonstrations against Israeli atrocities in the occupied Palestinian territories. Once more, not in respect prima facie of any clinical concerns. The MPTS was persuaded on 9 November 2025, in an opaque judgment preclusive in appraisal yet thin on evidential rationality, that Dr Kriesels be interim suspended from practice for nine months owing to a 'risk to patient safety' and for the 'protection of the public.'
Increasingly in the United Kingdom, selected individuals working in the liberal professions subject to regulatory supervision - such as doctors and medical practitioners - are finding themselves referred to disciplinary committees as a result of comment addressing the actualité of Israel/Palestine. Their common characteristic is that they are outspoken concerning abuses in particular stemming from Israel's response to Hamas' incursion of 7 October 2023, notably the unfettered onslaught executed by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) on press reporting, social services and welfare personnel and infrastructure throughout the Gaza Strip.
Vigilante provocateurs
Over the preceding decade or so, several 'charity'-styled watchdog groupings, some with international links to Zionist organisations, have emerged to challenge actions of solidarity with Palestinians. A favoured technique to provoke personnel suspensions or event cancellations is to sift media communications for evidence of detrimental comment concerning Israel. With the assistance of certain self-styled sleuth vigilantes, the aim was to silence supposed antisemitic expression either via civil litigation or, where available, by provoking disciplinary proceedings with respective professional regulatory bodies. Most notorious amongst these will probably be UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI), the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA), perhaps the Community Security Trust (CST), and (often amusingly) We Believe in Israel (WBI). In 2025, Cage International produced a report - Britain's Apartheid Apologists - on the history, tactics and politics of UKLFI and CAA.
In both of Dr Kriesel's and Dr Ali's cases, proceedings were instigated by UKLFI. Dr Ali had been arrested en route to her hearing in June 2025 under section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000 because of information regarding six (re-)tweets that had somehow been brought to the attention of West Yorkshire Police. Although for Dr Ali the interim suspension was subsequently revoked in July 2025, a complaint was then submitted immediately by the CAA to the General Medical Council (GMC) protesting the move. That the aim of these investigations resembles an application for a gagging order, rather than for protective measures tangibly in the public interest, is supported by further reported UKLFI interference with the political expression of medical general practitioner Dr Sian Arfon-Miners. The lobby group has asserted that, as a result of its complaint, the GMC on 13 January 2026 ordered Dr Arfon-Miners to desist from any social media posts relating to Gaza, Palestine, Israel or Hamas. There appear to be no minutes of proceedings obtainable in the public domain to support such a claim.
Relentless Obsession
The phenomenon of these groups returning again and again to formal decisions deemed by them as unsatisfactory is a regular characteristic of such campaigns. Most egregious by far to date has been the relentless quest to disrupt the career of reconstructive surgeon Ghassan Abu-Sittah, who has been obliged to answer to practitioner regulators ten times at the behest of pro-Israeli pressure groups - and on each occasion there has been found no case to answer.
Video: via Europalestine
Brought once again by UKLFI, the latest of these attempts - alleging multiple media statements supportive of violence and terrorism (some dating from 2018) - foundered on 9 January 2026. The GMC ruled none of the accusations of incitement proven. A conclusion to a prior complaint treated by the Interim Orders Tribunal of the GMC records:
The Tribunal declined to impose any interim conditions to regulate Dr Abu-Sittah’s use of social media. It had regard to the long history of humanitarian overseas work by Dr Abu-Sittah and added that it was not in the public interest to be deprived of a competent doctor.
Lobby targeting of Doctor Rahmeh Aladwan in response to her solidarity activism has extended beyond the career-threatening to sinister manipulation of statutory anti-terrorism laws and criminal prosecution. Serial denunciation sourced externally to the profession showed itself once more a definitive attribute. On 25 September 2025 at an intermediate orders hearing, the MPTS declined to impose either conditions or suspension in respect of political posts opposing Israeli activity in Palestine, despite persistent complaints from early 2024 initiated by UKLFI. Although the GMC's argumentation claimed the posts could be read as "antisemitic, supportive of terrorism, or otherwise damaging to public trust in the profession", the Tribunal concluded: the GMC’s concerns arose solely from political statements, not from Dr Aladwan’s clinical practice, which remains unblemished.
Dr Aladwan was represented by Rahman Lowe solicitors. After the ruling, Partner Zillur Rahman summarised that:
"This outcome sends a clear message: doctors cannot be targeted with regulatory sanctions simply for criticising state violence or advocating for human rights. Attempts to equate solidarity with Palestine with professional misconduct are deeply troubling and must be resisted."
Photo: Sqwawkbox
By 3 October, however, the GMC had notified Dr Aladwan of further allegations of unacceptable social media posts and renewed the referral for an intermediate order hearing (IOT) to be convened on 23 October 2025. Shortly after on 15 October, evidence emerged of instruction passing between the pro-Zionist activist grouping 'Stop The Hate' and Metropolitan Police officers at a solidarity demonstration in London. The activists were caught on camera nominating who to arrest and directing the arresting officers to their selected individual, which arrest (also filmed) the officers duly carried out. But for only eight minutes - because the mistaken person was not Dr Aladwan, the name handed on paper to the officers.
Photo: Sqwawkbox
'Jewish supremacy'
The incidence of an arrestable offence could be expected to weigh detrimentally for the defendant at an IOT hearing. On 21 October 2025 - two days before the date of the IOT referral - Dr Aladwan was arrested at her home on charges relating to alleged offences of stirring up racial hatred, malicious communications, and misuse of communications networks connected to a demonstration the preceding July. In the event, the IOT hearing adjourned proceedings until reconvening on 26 November 2025, when it ruled on interim suspension for 15 months for alleged antisemitic social media posts, reviewable after six months, while GMC investigations continued. Counsel for the GMC had claimed that it would be "unconscionable to consider that Dr Aladwan should be permitted to continue to practise" while posting content that "justifies terrorism, denies sexual violence, includes antisemitic conspiracy theories, misuses Holocaust and Nazi imagery and expresses support for proscribed groups and terrorist acts."
Three further arrests were to follow:
▶ - On 4 December 2025, following repeat co-ordinated complaints allegedly channelled via the Metropolitan Police involving the CAA, CST, and Leeds Jewish Leadership Council for conduct likely to stir up racial hatred during a demonstration in Leeds the previous August. West Yorkshire Police had twice declared no offence had been committed with respect to the allegations before the Met was somehow persuaded by the complainants to intervene.
▶ - On 22 December 2025 for alleged breaching of bail terms imposed on 4 December, which required Dr Aladwan to refrain from posting any material likely to stir up hatred vis-à-vis people with protected characteristics, including in particular the phrase 'Jewish supremacy'. Dr Aladwan asserts that this subsequent arrest relates solely to a posted description of those bail terms (featuring said phrase), and not to any other stand-alone comment that might have amounted to their breach.
▶ - On 15 January 2026 at home under section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000 for allegedly 'expressing support for a proscribed organisation' (Hamas) in online posts during November and December 2025. The charge ostensibly defers to a reference to the son of a member of the Palestinian resistance, killed in Gaza, as a 'martyr'.
Protected belief
The role of Interim Orders Tribunals lies not in evaluating the merits of the bundles to be brought before the MPTS, but in assessing the potential risk meanwhile to protection of the public, the interests of the public and those of the practitioner. An absence here of healthcare matters, however, anywhere within the reported specified allegations throws into doubt whether the GMC possesses a reasonable prospect of successful prosecution, should the case eventually come to full Tribunal.
Opposition to Zionism as an inherently racist, imperialist and colonial ideology offensive to human dignity - synonymous in effect with what is summarily critiqued in shorthand by the phrase 'Jewish supremacy' - has been established in law as a protected philosophical belief [Miller v University of Bristol 2024 (ET1400780/2022)]. Underlying that protection, so as to be consistent with Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (and its embodiment in UK statutes) is the principle that the State remains neutral in respect of competing beliefs, refraining from judgment between or partial intolerance of any one of them.
Apparent, then, from the above-related sequence of events is the non-existence of any material evidence that Dr Aladwan's social media activity has entailed potential compromise of patient safety or her ability to perform dutifully as a doctor. The same would apply rationally to a contention that her political views might undermine public confidence in the medical profession - why would anyone trust their welfare to a practitioner who considers the systematic slaughter of an unarmed population unremarkable? The GMC has issued guideline documentation on social media usage (Professional Standards - Using social media as a medical professional). It states:
Medical professionals, like everyone else, have rights to freedom of belief, privacy, and expression. But exercising these rights when using social media as a medical professional has to be balanced with the possible impact on other people’s rights and interests.
On 20 December 2025, Dr Kriesels was arrested at her home for social media posts allegedly stirring up racial hatred dating from 8 and 27 August 2025. Dr Kriesels has stated that police informed her that her charge identifies the term 'Jewish supremacy' as problematic. For both Drs Aladwan and Kriesels, police interventions at their homes had been attributed specifically to the phrase 'Jewish supremacy' - an explicit act of censorship and consequential interference with freedom of political expression.
Doing No Harm
Citing the MTPS Guidance* for IOT, the full test the Tribunal must apply to impose an interim order is as follows:
26. An IOT may make an interim order where they "are satisfied that it is necessary for the protection of members of the public or is otherwise in the public interest, or is in the interests of a fully registered person, for the registration of that person to be suspended or to be made subject to conditions."
27. In applying this test, the IOT should make the appropriate order if it is satisfied that:
a. in all the circumstances there may be impairment of the doctor’s fitness to practise which poses a real risk to members of the public, or may adversely affect the public interest or the interests of the doctor; and
b. after balancing the interests of the doctor and the interests of the public, that an interim order is necessary to guard against such risk.
The healthcare imperative with respect to private opinions addressing Jewish supremacy becomes no clearer.
Extraordinarily, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Wes Streeting, criticised the IOT decision reached on 25 September 2025 not to suspend, as he had done with the revocation of Dr Ali's temporary suspension two months earlier. Circumstances must suggest, then, that the GMC is compliant with the business of its administrative machinery being manipulated through concentrated pressure originating from pro-Israel lobbyists, and that such compliance is also subject to government-induced ministerial pressure.
The British Medical Journal (BMJ) reported on 10 October that as a result of the GMC's handling of the cases, Streeting is "planning to legislate for a new duty on NHS staff that would specifically prohibit them from making 'racist' statements." The BMJ also revealed that UK ministers were planning legislative changes to facilitate the issuance of suspension orders while GMC investigations were pending.
Inflicting lengthy practice suspensions before a full GMC hearing - where the process itself could be said to be a form of pre-emptive punishment - only rewards the disingenuous instrumentalisation of regulatory measures inappropriately employed in pursuit of tangential sectarian objectives. And all the more outrageously where those same objectives camouflage abrogation of universal freedoms of expression.
* Imposing interim orders – Guidance for the interim orders tribunal, tribunal chair and the medical practitioners tribunal, p.8 [www.mpts-uk.org ]