CARROLLTON, Ga.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul 17, 2026--
The Carrollton community and leaders from across the state of Georgia gathered at Tanner Medical Center/Carrollton on Friday, July 17, to celebrate the opening of Tanner Health and Mercer University School of Medicine (MUSM)’s clinical campus and simulation lab. Tanner has partnered with MUSM to establish a clinical campus in Carrollton, where third- and fourth-year students will live and work for their final two years of medical school.
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"This clinical campus represents an investment in the future of health care for our region," said Loy Howard, president and CEO of Tanner Health. "By partnering with Mercer University School of Medicine, we're helping educate the next generation of physicians while giving students the opportunity to train in the communities that need them most. We hope many of these future physicians will choose to build their careers here, strengthening access to high-quality care for generations to come."
The Carrollton campus features a dedicated medical education unit within the main Tanner Medical Center/Carrollton campus at 705 Dixie Street. The site offers all Year 3 core clerkships and electives, as well as the sub-internship, elective and required rotations for Year 4 of MUSM’s MD program.
Tanner Health serves a multi-county region, much of it rural, making its Carrollton clinical campus a strategic addition to Mercer’s existing campus locations and advancing the School’s mission. The first group of seven third-year medical students transferred to Carrollton from MUSM’s Columbus, Macon and Savannah campuses and will begin clinical rotations in early August.
"We are honored to partner with Tanner Health as we expand our mission in west Georgia. Our students have had quality experiences training with Tanner Health in Carrollton and Villa Rica during their population health and rural clerkships. We're excited to expand that partnership with our newest two-year clinical campus,” said Jean Sumner, MD, MACP, dean of MUSM. “Our commitment to serving rural, medically underserved Georgia remains unwavering. We are here to serve the healthcare needs of our state, and we're proud to become part of the Carrollton community.”
Mercer only admits Georgia residents to its MD program and prioritizes students from rural areas. Opening a clinical site in Carrollton expands the School’s reach to a critical medically underserved region. In addition to Tanner Health, students will rotate through clerkships at other regional facilities.
In addition to Howard and Dr. Sumner, those who spoke at the event included Penny L. Elkins, Ph.D., Mercer University president; Tim Paul, MD, associate dean of the Carrollton campus and senior vice president of medical affairs and chief quality officer for Tanner Health; and Daniel Jackson, chairman of Tanner Health’s board of directors.
Dr. Paul recognized the clinical clerkship directors who will guide curriculum and rotations, including Daniel Feckoury, MD (family medicine); Kenneth Genova, MD (psychiatry); Barry Harris, MD, FACS (surgery); Amanda Nguyen, MD (pediatrics); Emily Shelton, MD (obstetrics and gynecology); and Jesse Singh, MD (internal medicine).
The event included guided tours and demonstrations in the newly constructed medical simulation center, which will allow enable medical practice activities, including standardized patient encounters, to be provided on-site.
About Tanner Health
Tanner Health is a five-hospital non-profit health system providing convenient, personalized health care to communities across west Georgia and east Alabama. Tanner Health physicians and staff provide the latest technology and treatment options to advance the health of its patients. In addition to five regional hospitals and care centers, Tanner operates Tanner Medical Group, one of metro Atlanta’s largest multi-specialty physician groups. Learn more at tanner.org.
About Mercer University School of Medicine (Macon, Savannah and Columbus)
Mercer University’s School of Medicine was established in 1982 to educate physicians and health professionals to meet the primary care and health care needs of rural medically underserved areas of Georgia. Today, more than 60 percent of graduates currently practice in the state of Georgia, and of those, more than 80 percent are practicing in rural or medically underserved areas of Georgia. Mercer medical students benefit from a problem-based medical education program that provides early patient care experiences. Such an academic environment fosters the early development of clinical problem-solving and instills in each student an awareness of the place of the basic medical sciences in medical practice. The School opened additional four-year M.D. campuses in Savannah in 2008 and in Columbus in 2021, and a clinical campus in Valdosta in 2024. Following their second year, students participate in core clinical clerkships at the School’s primary teaching hospitals: Atrium Health Navicent The Medical Center and Piedmont Macon Medical Center in Macon; Memorial Health University Medical Center in Savannah; Piedmont Columbus Regional Hospital and St. Francis Hospital in Columbus; and SGMC Health in Valdosta. The School also offers master’s degrees in preclinical sciences and family therapy and Ph.D.s in biomedical sciences and rural health sciences.
From left: Tim Paul, M.D., associate dean of the Carrollton campus and senior vice president of medical affairs and chief quality officer for Tanner Health; Jean Sumner, M.D., MACP, dean of MUSM; Penny L. Elkins, Ph.D., Mercer University president; Loy Howard, president and CEO of Tanner Health; and Daniel Jackson, chairman of Tanner Health’s board of directors.
JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel’s military on Wednesday announced its first criminal investigations into troop conduct in Gaza, focusing on the killings of 5-year-old Hind Rajab and her family and of 15 Palestinian paramedics.
The military said it would not probe three other attacks that killed aid workers from World Central Kitchen and Doctors Without Borders. It said it had completed reviews of 150 incidents of troop conduct in Gaza and made decisions on the five cases.
Chef José Andrés, founder of U.S.-based World Central Kitchen, condemned the decision on X as “wrong and painful.”
The investigations involve killings that drew a heavy international outcry. Hind was trapped in a vehicle with her slain relatives, pleading for help by phone before she too was killed in February 2024. After the shooting of the 15 medics in March 2025, troops then bulldozed their bodies into a mass grave.
Israel’s campaign in Gaza has killed more than 73,000 people, including tens of thousands of women and children, according to the territory’s Health Ministry. Rights groups and U.N. commissions have said the campaign amounts to genocide and that Israeli forces have committed a litany of war crimes, including indiscriminate use of force and deliberate killings of civilians.
Israel denies accusations of genocide and war crimes and says it is targeting Hamas after its October 2023 attack on southern Israel. It blames civilian deaths on Hamas because the militant group operates in populated areas in the tiny, overcrowded strip.
Israeli officials contend its justice system can address any violations by its troops, but rights groups say soldiers are almost never held accountable.
Wednesday's statement did not mention many other high-profile killings that Israel has pledged to investigate, such as its strikes on a hospital in southern Gaza that killed five journalists in August 2025, including Mariam Dagga, a visual journalist who freelanced for The Associated Press and other news organizations.
Hind's grandmother, also named Hind Rajab, told the AP by phone that the Israeli investigation into her killing is not enough.
“An international investigation is required to uncover the truth and hold all those responsible accountable,” she said. “We call for justice, not only for Hind, but for all Gaza children.”
The military in Wednesday's statement admitted to firing at the car carrying the 5-year-old, four of her cousins and her aunt and uncle as they fled an Israeli invasion of Gaza City.
As gunfire sprayed around them, the girl's cousin, 15-year-old Layan Hamada, called the Palestinian Red Crescent paramedic center, telling them her family had been killed. Seconds later, more gunshots were heard, and Layan’s screaming stopped, according to the Red Crescent recording of the call.
Palestinian paramedics dispatched an ambulance to rescue Hind and stayed on the line with her until contact was lost. Hind, her five relatives and two medics from the ambulance were found dead 12 days later.
The military admitted Wednesday that troops had fired toward that ambulance, killing the two medics.
Dyab Abou Jahjah, director of the Belgium-based Hind Rajab foundation, told Al-Jazeera he considered the military investigations a “charade meant to whitewash the culprits instead of convicting them.”
The Palestinian Red Crescent also insists on an international investigation, said Raed al-Nims, a spokesman for the organization in Gaza. “Israeli measures are not enough,” he told the AP.
A movie docudrama about Hind's death, “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” won international awards and was nominated for an Oscar.
In the paramedics' killing, Israeli troops fired on an ambulance driving to retrieve casualties from an Israeli offensive in the southern city of Rafah, then fired on other emergency vehicles that came looking for the first one, according to phone footage and the sole survivor of the shootings. Fifteen medics and emergency responders from the Red Crescent and Gaza's Civil Defense were killed.
Troops then bulldozed over the bodies and vehicles, burying them in a mass grave. U.N. and rescue workers were only able to reach the site a week later to dig out the bodies.
The Israeli military initially said it opened fire because the vehicles were “advancing suspiciously” on troops without headlights or emergency signals. But it backtracked after the footage emerged, showing the teams driving slowly with their emergency lights flashing and logos visible. A deputy commander was directed to step down over the killings.
“We are not obligated to prove the truth because it is already proven to the whole world,” Eid Azizi, a Palestinian Red Crescent spokesperson, told the AP in a phone call. “We shouldn’t have reached this point if they respected and followed the international humanitarian law.”
The military said it had decided against a criminal investigation into April 2024 airstrikes that hit a convoy of World Central Kitchen vehicles, killing seven staffers.
The aid group, which distributes food in Gaza, said at the time it had coordinated with the military over the convoy's movement. The vehicles, which had the group’s logo on their roofs visible from the air, were left incinerated and mangled.
Wednesday's military statement said individuals in the vehicles were mistakenly identified as armed Hamas operatives. But it concluded that the commanders' decisions "did not raise reasonable suspicion of criminal misconduct.” At the time, two officers were removed from their positions and three others reprimanded.
World Central Kitchen responded in a statement saying the military’s account of the strike was untrue, “conflates different timelines and events, muddies the story and shifts the blame.” It called for an independent investigation.
The military also decided not to take criminal action over the killings of four staffers from Doctors Without Borders in two separate instances in November 2023 and February 2024.
Military investigators will now take up the probes and present their findings to military prosecutors. The military advocate general can then decide to keep investigating, indict any soldiers involved or decline to charge them.
Any action will take a long time, if it comes at all, said Tal Steiner, head of the Israeli rights group HaMoked.
Indictments are very uncommon and convictions even more so, she said, recalling only one soldier who had spent time behind bars since Oct. 7, 2023, for alleged abuse of Palestinian prisoners. That soldier was imprisoned for seven months under a June 2025 plea bargain.
“It’s very rare that soldiers accused of harming Palestinians even go to court ... and even rarer that they get a severe punishment,” Steiner said.
Just 0.17% of all military investigations launched during three Gaza operations from 2014 to 2022 led to prosecution, according to an analysis by Israeli rights group Yesh Din.
The war began on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas-led militants killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in southern Israel and abducted 251 others.
Israeli strikes have continued in Gaza since a ceasefire deal came into effect in October, killing at least 1,270 people, according to the Health Ministry.
Magdy reported from Cairo. Associated Press writer Erin Cunningham in Jerusalem contributed to this report.
FILE.- Mourners gather around the bodies of 8 Red Crescent emergency responders, recovered in Rafah a week after an Israeli attack, as they are transported for burial from a hospital in Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip, on Monday, March 31, 2025. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana,File)
