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Ghassan Abu Sitta is a Palestinian-British doctor, associate professor of surgery and plastic surgery, and is the first Arab doctor to develop a specialized curriculum on conflict and war medicine to train junior doctors. He worked as a volunteer surgeon in the wars in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and the Gaza Strip, and he is one of the survivors of the hospital massacre. Baptist, who was targeted by the Israeli occupation during its aggression against the Gaza Strip.
Birth and upbringing
Ghassan Abu Sitta was born in Kuwait to a Palestinian father and a Lebanese mother in 1969. His father’s family had been displaced from Beersheba in 1948 to Khan Yunis, and his father moved to Kuwait in 1953.
His father tried to keep him away from politics because he believed that the salvation of the Palestinian people was through education. He was from a struggling political family in Gaza. His uncle was one of the leaders of the 1929 revolution known as the Buraq Revolution and the 1936 revolution and one of the organizers of guerrilla work after the 1948 Nakba, and he completed it in southern Jordan after the 1967 war.
He studied at Dar Al Hanan Primary School, which was run by Salwa Abu Khadra, head of the Palestinian Women’s Union and a member of the Revolutionary Council of the Palestinian National Liberation Movement (Fatah), which he says influenced the course of his life. Politics was part of his childhood, and he grew up with it and was influenced by it. It also increased his His patriotism despite his estrangement.
Study and scientific training
He studied at the University of Glasgow in 1989 in Scotland and specialized in surgical medicine. He worked in the British capital, London, after graduating in 1993. He then specialized in pediatric craniofacial surgery and cleft palate surgery at Great Ormond Street Hospital. At the beginning of his medical career, he focused on treating children. .
His move to London to study at university was a new stage in his life, both politically and professionally. There, he immersed himself more in reading political books, and his political thought crystallized. At that time, the Al-Aqsa Intifada was at its peak, and medicine constituted an obstacle to his commitments in this aspect.
At the university, he joined the Palestinian Medical Aid Society, and through it he continued to introduce the Palestinian issue and organized lectures for that. Through it, he also founded with his colleagues the “Scottish Branch of the Society,” and became a member of the executive office of the Palestinian Medical Aid Society, which devoted its activities to collecting donations and establishing... Clinics in Palestine and southern Lebanon.
Medical experience
In 2011, Abu Sitta joined the American University of Beirut Medical Center, and a year later he headed the Department of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery and the Children’s War Injuries Program until 2020, then took over the multidisciplinary war injuries clinic.
The Palestinian doctor participated in establishing the “Conflict Medicine” curriculum at the Global Health Institute in 2015 at the American University of Beirut, and then became its director.
Abu Sitta led an augmented reality surgery via an interactive online platform, which was the first of its kind in Lebanon and the region, and his surgeries in Gaza helped reconstruct the hand of a child who suffered from a birth defect.
Abu Sitta says that Israel aims to make Gaza an uninhabitable place by targeting hospitals (Anatolia)
With the beginning of the Corona pandemic in 2020, he left Lebanon and returned to settle in England, and began working in plastic and reconstructive surgery in the private sector, and in 2021 he began working as a lecturer at the Center for Explosions Studies at Imperial College University.
After this professional experience, Abu Sitta believed that medicine was an effective tool for organizing society, activating it, and increasing its cohesion in a way that political work did not provide. From then on, he began trying to link the two paths and saw that there was no contradiction between them.
He believes that the testimony of doctors and health sector workers is stronger than any other political propaganda promoted in Western society.
His team was the first team to enter Karbala and Najaf after the Iraq War to study the health conditions there and document them in a way that refuted the American narrative that claimed that that war was “clean and moral.”
Gaza wars
Since the first intifada in 1987, Abu Sitta was keen to attend and participate in the treatment of wounded Palestinians. He was still a medical student at the time, and when he became a surgeon, he returned to Gaza at the time of the outbreak of the second intifada, and volunteered to treat the injured as a field doctor.
In the four wars launched by the occupation at the beginning of the millennium (2008, 2012, 2014, and 2018) on the Gaza Strip, he was present in the Strip to treat its Palestinian people. He also attended “the most cruel and intense of them,” as he says, in 2023, when the Israeli occupation attacked the Strip in response to the Battle of “Al-Aqsa Flood.” Which the Palestinian resistance launched last October 7 on the settlements surrounding the Gaza Strip.
Abu Sitta was constantly performing emergency surgeries without stopping, and moving between hospitals to treat the injured, most of whom were children.
Abu Sitta was able to enter the Gaza Strip through the Rafah crossing approximately two weeks after the start of the Israeli aggression, and he joined the medical staff that was busy treating 12 thousand injured people who were injured in only 12 days, and he remained for more than 40 days medicating and treating in light of the shortage of medicines and medical supplies and the interruption of water and electricity until He performed surgeries without anesthesia.
After the Baptist massacre - in which nearly 500 Palestinian civilians were killed on October 17 - Abu Sitta appeared in his medical gown among the bodies of the martyrs and narrated the tragedy of the massacre in front of the cameras in his capacity as a surviving witness and a doctor who came to do his job and nothing more.
The British Palestinian doctor learned that the British anti-terrorism police harassed his family because of his presence in Gaza, and that his wife was interrogated about the reason for his travel to Palestine, who was responsible for paying his ticket and the responsible charity that he was helping, after which he left Gaza saying that there was no benefit to his presence. Treatment, a sound health system, and no medical supplies.
Ghassan Abu Sitta became a witness to the massacres of the Israeli occupation, its illegal practices and weapons that it used against civilians in the Gaza Strip, and its targeting of the health system until it completely collapsed, documenting this in his account on the “X” platform.
Abu Sitta announced that he would provide his testimony before the International Criminal Court against Israel, noting that he had also submitted his testimony before the British police for the same purpose. He said that this testimony would be presented as one of the survivors of the Baptist massacre, and would document the type of injuries he treated and the internationally banned weapons used.
Doctor Ghassan Abu Sitta speaks to the press after the Baptist massacre (social networking sites)
Positions and responsibilities
In 2012, he was appointed medical officer for the pediatric war trauma program at the American University of Beirut Medical Center.
Member of the Board of Enara Charitable Society, which specializes in providing reconstructive surgery for children injured by wars in the Middle East.
Member of the Board of Trustees of the Medical Aid Foundation for Palestinians in Britain.
He volunteered as a surgeon in several wars that took place in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and southern Lebanon, and in several wars in Gaza.
Honorary Lecturer at the Center for Blast Injury Studies at Imperial College London.
Visiting Senior Lecturer in the Conflict and Health Research Team at King's College London.
Medical Officer in the Trauma Initiative in the Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean of the World Health Organization.
He was elected President of the University of Glasgow for a period of 3 years on March 27, 2024, by a vote in which he received 80% of the support of university students.
Compositions
Surgeon Abu Sitta wrote the medical book “Reconstructing a Patient Injured in War,” and he is considered one of the first Arab doctors to address this aspect and allocate a specialized curriculum for junior students to train them in the surgical interventions necessary after battles.
Abu Sitta dedicated his account on the “X” platform to be a documentary platform for what the occupation practices in the Gaza Strip, and he documented his medical experience, his surgeries, and his difficult stories during the Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip, which began in October 2024.
Abu Sitta is known for his efforts to convey the voice of the Palestinians, and he co-authored the book “The Narrative of the Palestinian Wound” with journalist Michel Nofal in 2020, in which they revealed Israel’s plan to make half of the Palestinian people “physically unable to live” and occupy the other half with treating the first half. This disrupts their normal lives and makes them a society unable to live a normal life socially, economically and healthily.
He used his experience as a war doctor to participate in a number of studies on the impact of wars on child mortality rates, malnutrition rates, and the targeting of health institutions in Lebanon and Palestine.
He also completed research papers in this field, writing about “How to target health institutions in countries of war” and “The impact of the American war on Iraq on the rate of child mortality and malnutrition.”
Source: Al Jazeera + Palestinian press