A British-Palestinian doctor who worked in Gazan hospitals during Israel’s war on Gaza hopes that testimony he has given to UK police will lead to Israel’s prosecutions for war crimes.
Ghassan Abu Sitta, a plastic surgeon specializing in conflict injuries, spent 43 days volunteering in the besieged Palestinian territory, mostly at the al-Ahli and Shifa hospitals in the north.
The 54-year-old has already testified to the Met, the UK’s biggest police force, about the injuries he saw and the kinds of weapons used, as part of the evidence being gathered for an International Criminal Court probe into alleged war crimes committed by both sides.
He is due to travel to The Hague this week to meet ICC investigators.
Abu Sitta said the intensity of the war was the greatest of the numerous conflicts he has worked in, including others in Gaza, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and South Lebanon.
“It’s the difference between a flood and a tsunami — the whole scale is completely different,” he told AFP during an interview in London on Sunday.
“Just the sheer number of the wounded, the size of the calamity, the number of children killed, the intensity of the bombing, the fact that within days of the war starting Gaza’s health system was completely overwhelmed.”
Israel has been carrying out a relentless bombardment and ground invasion that has killed at least 22,835 people – most of them women and children – in response to a Hamas attack on October 7, according to the Gaza health ministry.
Abu Sitta – born in Kuwait and who has lived in Britain since the late 1980s – arrived in Gaza from Egypt on October 9 as part of a Doctors Without Borders medical team.
“From the very beginning our capacity was less than the number of wounded we were having to treat. Increasingly we were having to make very difficult decisions about who to treat,” he recalled.
Abu Sitta remembers one 40-year-old man coming into the hospital with shrapnel in his head. He needed a CT scan, and to see a neurosurgeon, but they did not have one.
“We told his children and they stayed around his trolley that night until he passed away in the morning,” he said.
The hospitals also quickly ran out of anesthetic and analgesic drugs, meaning the surgeon had to perform “really painful cleaning procedures of wounds” without relief.
“It was a choice between doing that or watching them succumb to the wound infections and dying from sepsis,” he added.
