Palestinian-British surgeon Ghassan Abu Sitta, witness to the atrocities perpetrated by the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip, where he spent a month and a half at the start of the war, was refused entry on Saturday 4 May, on French territory. Arriving early in the morning at Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle airport, from London where he lives, the doctor, who was to speak in a conference organized that same day at the Senate, was turned away by the border police.
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Reason given by the agents: the German authorities, who had also prevented him from entering their soil in mid-April, when he was to participate in a conference on Palestine in Berlin, banned him from visa, for a period of one year, in all Schengen area states. Ghassan Abu Sitta, that The world contacted on his phone, was in an airport office late in the morning, and expected to be escorted by police to a flight back to London.
His attempts to alert the organizer of the conference, the senator of Rhône Raymonde Poncet-Monge, member of Europe Ecologie-Les Verts, via his assistant, whom he contacted, produced no results. “The police have made their decision, there is nothing more I can do, he confided to World. It’s like in Berlin, the criminalization of the victims. The gang complicit in the genocide tries to silence the witnesses. »
Forty-three days of operations in Gaza
A war medicine specialist, Ghassan Abu Sitta jumped on a plane to reach Gaza on October 7, in the hours following the massacre committed by Hamas in southern Israel, as he had done during the previous three wars hitting the Palestinian enclave.
Integrated into the Doctors Without Borders teams, he worked in Al-Shifa hospital, the largest in the Gaza Strip, and in Al-Ahli hospital. He left the coastal territory on November 18, after forty-three days of continuously operating on the victims of Israeli bombings, which have left nearly 35,000 dead to date, the majority of them civilians.
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Already very active on social networks when he was there, the practitioner gave numerous interviews after leaving the enclave, recounting the amputations without anesthesia that he had to perform, the installation of raw staples to close the wounds, children burned by white phosphorus shells (a weapon whose use for incendiary purposes is prohibited), hospitals so saturated that doctors operate on the floor, etc.
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