A doctor and professor is suing the University of California, San Francisco, alleging school officials fired her for her advocacy for Palestinian human rights in an attempt to silence her.

In late May, UCSF terminated Rupa Marya following a nine-month suspension from the elite medical school based on social media posts in which she criticized Israel’s genocide in Gaza and questioned how Zionist ideology affects health care outcomes. As a part of her dismissal, UCSF officials will place a letter of censure in Marya’s file for 10 years, which she said will likely damage her ability to seek future employment and continue practicing medicine.

In two free speech complaints, filed simultaneously this week in state and federal courts in Alameda County, California, Marya alleges the school discriminated against her for advocating on behalf of Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students and colleagues. She told The Intercept that it’s especially important that those who work in medicine feel free to call out the conditions in Gaza, where Israel’s attacks on hospitals and its blockade on aid have caused a suite of overlapping health crises, prompting a famine risk amid ongoing bombardment.

“It’s critical that we have the ability to speak out about this as professionals, as health care workers, as citizens, and not only of the United States but of the world, but also as U.S. taxpayers whose money is going to fund this genocide,” Marya said.

Her lawsuits seek damages for loss of income and emotional and psychological distress — and come at a time when the University of California system has censured multiple faculty and staff members for speaking out about Palestine.

The University of California and UCSF did not immediately respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment.

The complaints, which name as defendants UCSF officials including the school’s Chancellor Sam Hawgood, allege that UCSF began to target Marya’s advocacy even before she began to speak out about Palestine. Marya’s scholarship includes research into the impacts of colonialism and structural racism in health care. The state complaint says her advocacy for her Black or unhoused patients had drawn criticism from some of her white colleagues, who allegedly used “racist tropes” against Marya, a woman of Indian descent and raised in a Sikh household.

“UCSF leadership repeatedly characterized Dr. Marya’s advocacy for marginalized patients as ‘unprofessional,’ ‘aggressive’ and ‘harmful,’” the complaints read.

Such targeting was magnified, the complaints argue, when Marya began to speak out on social media against Israel’s offensive in Gaza following Hamas’s October 7 attacks. After she criticized the school’s silence on the killings of Palestinians in her posts, UCSF Provost Catherine Lucey called Marya in for questioning, according to the state complaint.

Marya continued to post about Gaza. She posted a viral tweet calling for solidarity with Gaza’s health care workers, drawing threats of death and rape. Marya notified school officials, including Lucey, about the threats, asking the school to temporarily remove her personal email and her profile from the school’s public website, the complaints said. In the past, Lucey and school officials had taken similar protective measures amid the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020.

In this instance, however, UCSF officials ignored Marya’s requests. Instead, Talmadge King Jr., the dean of UCSF’s School of Medicine, emailed Marya, informing her that officials would assess whether Marya’s social media posts about Gaza had “violated university policies,” the complaints alleged.

Marya had also reported “racist, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian remarks,” including Islamophobic comments made by her colleagues in school email threads to the school’s anti-harassment and discrimination office. The cases were closed without any serious investigations, the complaints alleged. Meanwhile, the university went on to........

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