PHR-Israel was founded in 1988 with the aim of struggling for human rights — and in particular the right to health — in Israel and in the Occupied Territories. Human dignity, mental and physical well-being, and the right to health lie at the heart of the organization’s vision and inform our activities and efforts at both the individual and the broader level. Our activities combine advocacy and action to change harmful policies together with direct action for health.
Today PHR-Israel has more than 1,150 members, over half of them health professionals. “The Israeli-Palestinian Physicians for Human Rights Association,” as the association was then called, was established during the first months of the Palestinian uprising in the Occupied Territories by a group of Israeli and Palestinian physicians. Dr. Ruchama Marton initiated the group and was its first President.
Day after day, people were being wounded and killed. One of the association’s first activities was a visit to the hospitals of the Gaza Strip and a protest against the use of medical care as a means of controlling the local population. We also protested against the participation of physicians in the torture of Palestinian detainees. The association’s actions were grounded in the principles of medical ethics and in the international conventions that apply to medical personnel.
Since the founding of PHR-Israel we have broadened our activities, and today we focus on a wider range of subjects, on health in its fullest sense, calling for social solidarity both within and beyond Israel’s borders.
Today we run five projects: the Occupied Territories Project, the Prisoners and Detainees Project, the Migrant Workers and Refugees Project, the Project for the Unrecognized Villages of the Negev, and the Israeli Residents Project. In addition, we run a mobile clinic in the Occupied Territories and an open clinic in Tel Aviv that provides services to all those in Israel who have no legal status and therefore no health insurance.
The association believes that the combination of medical ethics and human rights serves as a moral touchstone for physicians who find themselves caught in conflicts between the system in which they work and the demands of their conscience. This moral foundation also operates in situations where the code of professional conduct and human rights are challenged, as in the case of the participation of doctors in torture.
Physicians for Human Rights-Israel works in cooperation and solidarity with other organizations — Israeli, Palestinian, and foreign. At the legislative level, Israel employs the rhetoric of “justice, equality, and mutual aid.” PHR-Israel works to put these values into practice, fighting not only to help individuals but also to change the policies that underlie human rights violations.
PHR-Israel is a member of the IFHHRO (International Federation of Health and Human Rights Organizations).
Over the years this foundation has won numerous awards, including the Prime Minister’s “Defense of the Child” prize and the Emil Grunzweig prize of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel. The association’s President and its Director of Fieldwork have won the Jonathan Mann Award.
(Translated from the website www.phr.org.il)