Ghassan Abu Sitta is a British-Palestinian surgeon and rector of the University of Glasgow. He has conducted medical missions in Palestine since the First Intifada and operated in various theaters of war, Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Lebanon. After months spent working as a volunteer in Gaza’s hospitals, since Saturday he has been persona non grata in Europe: a one-year ban throughout the Schengen area.
I would like to start from his story. You yourself are a refugee, born in diaspora. His family was driven out of his village in Palestine during the Nakba by the Haganah paramilitary unit and took refuge in Khan Younis, Gaza. As we speak, 100,000 Palestinians in Rafah have received an army evacuation order. Are we witnessing a new Nakba?
What we are witnessing is a genocide that European countries and the United States have been protecting for seven months so that it can continue. What we are seeing is the fact that European governments and the EU have spent seven months preventing the genocide from being stopped and increasing the shipment of weapons to Israel tenfold so that it does not run out of ammunition while it kills. Rafah is another chapter in this genocide, even if Israeli military analysts themselves say there will be no war benefit other than a massacre. When we say genocide as a war goal, we mean this: Rafah is another example of the military goal being the killing of Palestinians.
Since the First Intifada he has brought his medical experience to Palestine. He has done it during all the military offensives of the last twenty years. What difference did he see in Israeli military practices past and present?
It’s the difference between a flood and a tsunami. Today’s offensive is different in scale, size, intensity from any other war in history: the difference lies in the systematic destruction of the health system as an integral part of the military strategy. It had not been seen in any war. I have seen many and never have I witnessed the destruction of healthcare as the backbone of the entire project. Because the goal is to make Gaza unlivable.
What have hospitals been transformed into? I am thinking above all of Shifa, a pillar of Palestinian society and a living archive of the drama of Gaza.
We saw this on October 17 when they hit Al-Ahli. Then they destroyed all the other hospitals. They turned the Shifa into a mass grave, and they did the same to the Nasser of Khan Younis. They killed Dr. Adnan Bursh, the head of orthopedic surgery at Shifa, in prison. The destruction of the healthcare system does not only involve the destruction of buildings, but also the killing of over 400 doctors, nurses and paramedics and the incarceration of hundreds of them. It passes through their liquidation in Israeli prisons. Shifa, specifically, is the largest institution in all of Gaza. It’s the largest facility, the largest employer. When you are in Gaza and you get lost, if you ask for directions, they answer using Shifa as the cardinal point. It represents 30% of the entire healthcare system. It was built by the British during the Mandate, then expanded by the Egyptians, the Palestinian Authority under Arafat and then Hamas. It is the oldest institution. This is why the Israelis made it a mass grave.
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The International Court of Justice has warned of the plausible risk of genocide. Upstream lies the devastation of every form of subsistence and life: the food system, the production sector, healthcare, electricity and water networks but also the education system. You often speak about the importance of education in the formation of the Palestinian generations, who have among the highest levels of school and university education both in Palestine and in the diaspora. Why is it so important?
For Palestinians, and in particular for my father’s generation, those who survived the Nakba, education is the one thing that no one can take away from you. When my father’s generation lost everything, their social network, their homes, their social status and found themselves a refugee in what was a real social death, education was central, no one could blame it. And for all subsequent Palestinian generations, education was the thing to invest in. It is for this reason, to ensure that Palestinians have no sense of the future, that the Israeli army destroyed all 12 universities in Gaza and killed around a hundred professors and deans.
Last month he was due to attend a public event in Germany to talk about his work in Gaza. But he was detained at the airport and deported. And now she is under a one-year ban which prevented her from entering France. What happened?
When they stopped me in Germany I was told, orally, that the ban would last only for the month of April and only for German territory because the objective was to prevent me from participating in that conference. So when I was invited to speak at the French Senate, I never thought I would be stuck at Charles de Gaulle airport. I was shocked to hear the passport office official tell me that Germany had imposed an entry ban throughout the Schengen area until April 2025.
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In many European countries, dissent is increasingly criminalized, reaching dangerous heights of repression. What is the climate in Britain and Europe?
If in Europe it is the states that carry out criminalisation, in Great Britain it is done by the apparatus of the right: Rupert Mardoch’s newspapers, pro-Israel organizations and so on. In my case, and this is the opinion of my lawyers, the reason Germany banned me from the whole of Europe is to prevent me from returning to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Prosecutor Karim Khan complained last week about the pressure European governments are putting on the court not to issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu, Gallant and Halevi. I think in my case the goal is to prevent me from reaching Holland. I have already testified but they will call me back when the case goes to trial.
In a recent article in Progressive International Wire, you write: «Gaza is the laboratory that global capital looks to for the management of excess populations. (…) The weapons that Benjamin Netanyahu uses today are the weapons that Narendra Modi will use tomorrow.”
The Israeli military industry is already advertising products used in the field. There is an infamous statement from one of the CEOs of an Israeli company in which he says he lives just ten minutes from the lab. The laboratory is Gaza. Israel is at the forefront not only of killer robots and facial recognition software, but also of quadcopters. These are the drones used in Gaza, small and with a sniper rifle, they were used against hospitals. When I was at Al-Ahli, in just one day we received 30 wounded from quadcopters, they circled the hospital and shot anyone who tried to enter. These technologies and this philosophy are used against the politically surplus population, the Palestinians of Gaza but not only. They are the slums of Mumbai or those of Nairobi and Sao Paulo or the refugees crossing the Mediterranean. Or the population of Kashmir where the Indian police are increasingly using Israeli techniques. There has already been an increase in orders for Israeli weapons used in this war, Israel’s economy ministry said. In the coming years we will see quadcopters in other places in the world to “manage” the excess population, the socially unwanted.
