France has banned a British-Palestinian doctor from entering the Senate

British-Palestinian plastic and reconstructive surgeon Ghassan Abu Sitta, who is also chancellor of the University of Glasgow, was invited to the French Senate to speak at a conference on Gaza. However, he was denied entry to France after arriving on Saturday.

As the Qatari Al Jazeera television reports on its website, Abu Sitta, who spent 43 days in Gaza as part of the Doctors Without Borders organization, where he helped treat civilians injured during the ongoing conflict, was placed in the detention zone at the airport. And he was informed that he had to go back to London.

According to Le Monde, French police said the country could not accept the doctor because it was bound by a ban on entry into Europe’s borderless area. Germany issued a stop sign for entry into Schengen to doctors.

“It’s decided, there’s nothing I can do,” Abu Sitta told the newspaper. “It’s Berlin déjà vu. It is the criminalization of victims. They are trying to silence the witness.’

“It’s a shame,” French left-wing senator Raymonde Poncet Monge, who invited the surgeon to Paris for a conference called “France and its responsibility in applying international law in Gaza,” commented on the event on the X network.

Last month, Abu Sitta was denied entry to Germany to attend a pro-Palestinian conference, according to APnews. The agency cited his claim that he was told by French police that he had been denied entry due to “the safety of the people at the conference and public order”.

Ghassan Abu Sitta, who, according to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, was one of the speakers at the ceremony on the occasion of the one-year anniversary of the death of the co-founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine Maher al-Jamani in 2020, has long criticized the war in the Gaza Strip.

In March of this year, the British non-governmental organization Lawyers for Israel reminded the Glasgow University, where the doctor works, of his harsh anti-Israel statements. According to Wikipedia, The Times, for example, reported that Abu Sitta compared the Israeli leadership to “the psychosis of the Germans in the 1930s and 1940s.”

He was now in Gaza with MSF from October to November 2023. Upon his return, he described his experiences at a press conference in London – including the unsubstantiated claim that Israel was using illegal white phosphorus munitions. The Israeli army strongly objected to this.