Bahrain, the tiny but strategically important Persian Gulf monarchy that has sought for months to suppress an Arab Spring-inspired uprising, is engaged in a heated dispute with one of the world’s foremost medical relief organizations, which has stopped working there after accusing Bahraini security forces of raiding its premises last week.

The accusation by the organization, Doctors Without Borders, has been challenged by Bahrain’s Health Ministry. But the sensitivities surrounding the dispute over the July 28 raid speak to what human rights activists call a particularly odious aspect of the Bahraini protests: the government’s systematic effort to deny medical services to wounded protesters — partly by jailing or intimidating the doctors, nurses and paramedics who have tried to treat them.

Many medical workers in Bahrain are often too frightened to help protesters, activists say, and the wounded themselves are often too frightened to seek help, fearing they will be arrested.

At the height of the protests, led by the kingdom’s Shiite majority, seeking more rights from the Sunni monarchy, security forces commandeered the Salmaniya Medical Complex, Bahrain’s largest public hospital. Dozens of doctors and nurses who treated protesters were arrested.