SYDNEY: Two Australian nurses have been removed from their jobs over a “sickening” video showing them bragging they would let Israelis die in their hospital, authorities said Wednesday.
Footage released on Israeli influencer Max Veifer’s social media channels appeared to show him in an online chat with a male and a female nurse at a Sydney hospital.
“I am so upset that you are Israeli, eventually you are going to get killed,” the male nurse tells him in an anti-Semitic tirade.
Asked by Veifer how they would treat Israeli patients, the male nurse says he has sent many Israeli patients to hell.
The female nurse says: “I won’t treat them, I will kill them.”
Some of the dialogue was censored and it was not immediately possible to verify the full circumstances of the recording.
It was the latest in a series of anti-Semitic incidents over recent months in which vandals have torched a Sydney childcare centre, firebombed a Melbourne synagogue and scrawled anti-Semitic graffiti in Jewish neighbourhoods.
“This video is disgusting. It is shocking. It is appalling,” New South Wales health minister Ryan Park told reporters, announcing an investigation by the state’s police and health authorities.
The pair had been “stood down immediately”, he added.
“Those people subject to that investigation will not ever be working for New South Wales health again.”
Park said an initial assessment of the hospital’s records indicated that it had been operating safely and with care.
The state’s police force said it had identified the nurses and “a thorough investigation is underway”.
The male nurse reportedly told Sydney’s Daily Telegraph newspaper the incident was a “joke, a misunderstanding” and promised to apologise.
Relatives of the female nurse were quoted by The Australian as saying she was having an anxiety attack over the furore.
Prime minister Anthony Albanese told parliament he had seen the video.
“It is driven by hate, and it is disgusting. The comments are vile, the footage is sickening and it is shameful,” he said.
