A British-Palestinian doctor accustomed to war and returning from Gaza described to AFP on Sunday a deadly conflict of unprecedented intensity and hoped his testimony to British police would lead to a prosecution for war crimes.
Ghassan Abu Sitta, a 54-year-old plastic surgeon who specializes in war injuries, spent 43 days volunteering in the Palestinian territory, mostly at al-Ahli and al-Chifa hospitals in the northern Gaza Strip.
According to him, the intensity of the conflict exceeds that of others where he has worked, in Gaza, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and southern Lebanon: “It is the difference between a flood and a tsunami, the scale is completely different. ” he explains. It is characterized by “the number of wounded,” “the number of children killed, the intensity of the bombings and the fact that the health system in Gaza had completely collapsed in the days after the start of the war,” he emphasizes.
“Choose who you want to treat”
Ghassan Abu Sitta was born in Kuwait and has lived in the United Kingdom since the late 1980s. He arrived in Gaza from Egypt on October 9 as part of a team from Doctors Without Borders. “From the beginning, the capacity was less than the number of wounded we had to treat. Increasingly, we had to make very difficult decisions about who to treat,” he recalls.
He mentions the case of a 40-year-old man who was hospitalized with shrapnel in his head. He needed a CT scan and had to see a neurosurgeon, but there was none. “We told his children and they stayed around his stretcher that night until he died in the morning,” he said.
White phosphorus burns
The doctor assures that he treated burns caused by white phosphorus, whose use as a chemical weapon is banned under international law but which remains permitted to illuminate battlefields or create a smoke screen. Lebanon has accused Israel of using white phosphorus in the conflict. “It is a very characteristic injury,” explains the doctor. “Phosphorus continues to burn into the deepest parts of the body until it reaches the bone. »
Dr. Abu Sitta explains that he left Gaza because the lack of medical equipment prevented him from carrying out operations. He told London police about the injuries he had seen, the type of weapons used, the use of white phosphorus and “attacks on civilians”. Scotland Yard emphasizes that it is responsible for international justice to collect evidence of possible war crimes on both sides.
“Ultimately,” the doctor believes, “justice will come to these people, if not in five years, then in ten years, when they are 80 years old, when the balance of power in the world will allow justice for the Palestinians.”