Doctors demand Yoram Blachar resign over Israeli torture

More than 700 doctors from 43 countries have written a letter of protest to their governing ethical body, the World Medical Association, alleging that its recently appointed Israeli president has turned a blind eye to the involvement of medical staff in torture, and calling for his removal.

Dr Yoram Blachar, leader of the Israeli Medical Association since 1995, assumed the helm of the WMA in November. The signatories to the letter, who include senior doctors and professors from the UK, Europe and the US, claim he has failed to answer charges that some Israeli doctors condone or collaborate with a regime that uses torture against Palestinian prisoners.

As long ago as 1996, the letter says, Amnesty International concluded that doctors in Israel working with the security services "formed part of a system in which detainees are tortured, ill-treated and humiliated in ways that place prison medical practice in conflict with medical ethics".

The letter, whose lead signatory is the paediatrician Alan Meyers from the Boston University school of medicine, says Blachar's presidency "makes a mockery of the principles on which the WMA was founded in 1947, which was as a response to egregious abuses by German and Japanese doctors" in the second world war. More