Jewish patients report nurses deliberately botching needle insertions in Australian hospitals

“Anti-Israel activism began almost immediately after the October 7 massacre when the protests that unfolded in Australian cities spilt into the wards and staff rooms of hospitals in Melbourne, Sydney and other capital cities,” report author Megan Goldin wrote.

Many medics wore protest symbols to work right after the attack, while some covered bathroom stalls and hallways with stickers, including a Star of David with a red line through it, the report said.

“At the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, which has received tens of millions of dollars from Jewish philanthropists, such stickers were stuck to the bedside wall of an elderly Jewish patient in the hours before he died,” she wrote.

A number of doctors also reportedly spouted antisemitism and support for terror groups online.

“Doctors and nurses were posting Nazi symbols and little caricatures of Jewish people but using the word ‘Zionist’ instead of ‘Jews’,” Jewish paediatric neurologist Carly Debinski told The Australian. “They were so virtuous and obsessive about vilifying Jewish people.”

Debinski has since moved to Israel.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry called the investigation a “deeply troubling picture and should serve as a wake-up call.

“We call upon the Australian government to confront antisemitism forcefully.

“No Jew should ever feel compelled to hide their identity to receive medical care in an Australian hospital.”

The ministry included a link to The Wentworth Report, which quoted large sections of The Australian article.

The piece detailed multiple examples of online hate. It said that Jewish members of medical Facebook groups had been ejected or vilified when they spoke out about Israeli hostages or the horrors perpetrated by Hamas on October 7.

At a Melbourne hospital, a Jewish intensive care unit nurse – who requested to remain anonymous – reportedly resigned after more than 10 years on the job because management refused to address the online hate speech by other staff members.

“If these people are willing to share these things on social media, imagine how they treat a [Jewish] patient face-to-face,” she said.

Claims of double standards

A Jewish healthcare worker at a Melbourne teaching hospital was reportedly accosted physically by a colleague from Ireland, demanding she apologise for the Gaza war. When a complaint was made, the hospital’s human resources department refused to take action, The Australian alleged. 

No action was allegedly taken over a complaint against a doctor who described Jews as “loathed slime” online and posted a Hitler quote. Complaints about numerous other doctors who posted antisemitic, pro-Hamas content were also reportedly closed.

“That pattern was repeated across the country as hospitals and healthcare regulators tolerated conduct against Jews that would have triggered disciplinary action if the conduct had targeted any other minority group, say numerous medical professionals who experienced this double standard,” the paper wrote.

Painful IV insertions

Charlotte Frajman, 64, daughter of an Auschwitz survivor, said that one nurse changed his behaviour when he saw on her hospital records that she was Jewish.

“When it came to putting in the cannula [IV], he took four attempts. It was incredibly painful,” Frajman told The Australian. “I was bruised for weeks. You would have thought he was a trainee nurse, not the senior nurse in charge.”

When the same nurse again took four attempts to insert cannulas during subsequent visits, Frajman did not know what to think. “Then the Bankstown nurses thing came out, and my husband and I looked at each other and we said: ‘Oh my God.’”

Frajman referred to a February 2025 incident in which two nurses who worked at Bankstown-Lidcombe Hospital in Sydney were arrested after allegedly threatening Israeli patients in an antisemitic rant online. Charges were brought against them but in June, the judge ruled the video inadmissible, making a conviction unlikely.

“If I can’t have my Jewish religion on my medical records then it’s time to leave Australia because we are no longer safe here,” said Frajman.

“The needles, it is a story that keeps repeating,” says Nurit Hadad, a New South Wales-based mental health nurse counselling victims of antisemitism. “This is the easiest way to hurt people. They say: ‘I’ve done my best but I just couldn’t find a vein.’”

Orit Brand pleaded with a radiographer to stop after failing eight times to insert an IV into her vein at a Melbourne hospital. Another staff member who was called inserted the IV at the first attempt “with no pain and no bruising”.

While malice is difficult to prove, in the cases of Brand and Frajman, hospital protocol called for a maximum of two attempts by the same staffer.

Jewish medical students also described being ostracised by fellow students. Many of those interviewed by The Australian withheld their names because they worried about their safety and future job prospects.

The paper found the field of mental health to be the most affected by antisemitism. A Queensland-based psychotherapist reportedly called on Israelis to kill themselves in one post. A psychiatry department academic at an Australian university was said to have compared queues at food distribution centres in Gaza to the scenes in front of Holocaust gas chambers.

Mental health nurse Hadad panicked when a colleague draped a keffiyeh over an adjacent desk after October 7.

“If someone is coming with a keffiyeh to a workplace, Australian people who have nothing to do with Middle Eastern culture ... it’s a statement of violence,” said Hadad. “It represents the people trying to kill me.”

Hadad asked her managers to ban protest symbols in the workplace. After months of feeling unsafe at work, she quit her job.