Nicole Lampert
Unherd, Dec. 2, 2023
“Salman has dedicated much of his life to pushing for the controversial “right of return” of Palestinians to the land which is now Israel. He has called Israelis “ghetto-dwellers in Europe who came to take our land”, described the founding of the state of Israel as “exactly like Nazi Germany occupying France”, and claimed the country had “set up detention and forced labour camps for the Palestinians”.”
In the weeks since Israel launched its offensive against Hamas, one doctor’s reports from Gaza’s hospitals have proved more valuable to the media than any other: those delivered by Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a British-Palestinian surgeon. Indeed, when Abu-Sittah held a press conference in London this week after a 43-day stint in Gaza, almost every leading outlet turned up.
Israel, he told them, was deliberately targeting children with banned weapons: “The primary Target of the bombing was people’s residential homes,” he claimed at one point, the footage of which was later uploaded to The Guardian’s website. “And we started seeing phosphorus burns. By day four or five, half of my operating list, which was around 10 to 12 cases every day… were children. At one night in al-Ahli hospital, I performed amputations on six children.”
Describing him as “softly-spoken”, a Sky News correspondent repeated his claim that a rocket which hit the al-Ahli was not fired by Palestinian terrorists, despite compelling evidence to the contrary. “There was no smell of fuel,” Abu-Sittah was quoted as saying. “You’d think that a missile that was destined for Tel Aviv would be full of fuel.” The channel also repeated the doctor’s insistence that al-Shifa — another of the hospitals where he worked — was not a Hamas command centre, a claim which contradicts recent Israeli findings. “At no stage did I see any [Hamas terrorists] — at no stage did I see even armed policemen — at Shifa hospital.”
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