When members of the international media, such as reporters for the BBC, Canal Cinq, and RaiUno, want to get the latest news and perspectives, about Gaza, they frequently depend on information provided by a British-Palestinian surgeon, Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah. He speaks fluent English, which obviates any need for an interpreter, and he also knows how to talk plausibly to Western audiences. He lives in London, but over the years he has spent much time in Gaza, sometimes working as a surgeon, but also, more importantly, as a conveyer of stories about the Strip to Western media. He has recently been spending a lot of time in Gaza. Indeed, he has proved such a smooth operator on behalf of the Cause of Palestine, so fashionable on British campuses, that anti-Israel students have elected him the Rector of Glasgow University. More on Dr. Abu-Sittah can be found here: “Media’s Darling Doctor Ghassan Abu-Sittah: Anti-Hamas Palestinians ‘Stabbed Resistance in the Back,’” by Rachel O’Donoghue, HonestReporting, March 31, 2025:
In the largest anti-Hamas demonstrations Gaza has seen in years, thousands of Palestinians have taken to the streets over the past week. Protesters in the north of the Strip — particularly in Gaza City — have chanted “Hamas out” and “Hamas are terrorists,” while holding banners that read, “Hamas does not represent us.”
Hamas has responded with predictable brutality. According to reports from local activists, at least six protest organizers have been executed. Others were tortured and dumped in public areas as a warning. The family of 22-year-old Oday Nasser Al Rabay says Hamas kidnapped him and later left his body on their doorstep, with witnesses reportedly describing how he was beaten with metal rods and dragged by a rope tied around his neck.
So far, at least six of the most visible anti-Hamas protesters in Gaza have been seized, tortured, and murdered by the terror group. Still more were tortured but left alive with the signs of their torture visible, now their wounds serving to warn others what those continuing to protest should expect will be their fate.
This is the cost of dissent in Gaza. And yet Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah — the British-Palestinian surgeon celebrated by Western media and recently elected Rector of the University of Glasgow — has made it clear he stands with the torturers, not the tortured.
In an Arabic-language interview with Russian state-controlled media RT, Abu-Sittah dismissed the protests as “a type of psychological warfare against the resistance in Gaza.” He claimed they were orchestrated by the Palestinian Authority and denounced them as “a betrayal and treachery.” According to Abu-Sittah, those risking their lives to speak out against Hamas have “stabbed the resistance in the back.”
Apparently, opposing a UK-designated terror group in Gaza is now “treachery” in the eyes of Glasgow’s rector.
Abu-Sittah should be making common cause with the brave people in Gaza — those who dare to express publicly the widespread rage against Hamas for causing so much destruction and immiseration, while at the same time stealing so much of the aid entering Gaza for its own operatives and their families, and keeping some of what remains for resale, at exorbitant prices, to the people of Gaza to whom the aid was supposed to be delivered for free. Instead, he denounces them, has no sympathy with them, because he doesn’t want the terror group Hamas to be undermined in any way in the eyes of the Western world.
He even mocked the scale of the protests, insisting they were smaller than the crowds who “used to come out every time there was a prisoner exchange” — a disturbing comment, since such exchanges involved Hamas trading brutalized Israeli hostages for convicted terrorists. One can reasonably infer Abu-Sittah was among the celebrants.
Hamas and Israel have not, pace Ghassan Abu-Sittah, been engaged in a “prisoner exchange.” The Israelis are trading hundreds of convicted terrorists, including many who were found guilty of murdering Israelis, for a handful of innocent hostages. Abu-Sittah’s attempt by sleight of word to suggest that those being released by Hamas and Israel are somehow equivalent is grotesque.
crown says
“ Ghassan Abu-Sittah, Rector of Glasgow University”
We can’t be too far away from the time when poor Charles Martel will be spinning in his grave.
For, as Edward Gibbon speculated, about the world we would have, had Martel not been victorious at Tours in 732:
“ A victorious line of march had been prolonged above a thousand miles from the rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire; the repetition of an equal space would have carried the Saracens to the confines of Poland and the Highlands of Scotland; the Rhine is not more impassable than the Nile or Euphrates, and the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet”
Betty Boop says
This guy has to be hounded out of the UK.
Eddie says
That articulate and intelligent Muslims can support murderers is disturbing.
In the UK we also had a Muslim senior Doctor as head of Hizb ut Tahrir.
We have Muslim Justice Minister who is a Pro Palestine supporter and we must assume she agrees with Hamas and the destruction of Israel.
We were told in the UK that immigration into the UK would be people who were of the calibre of Doctors and Engineers.
Complete rubbish of course but some of us remember a few years back when an Islamic car bomb attack at Glasgow airport (?) was thwarted it was a Doctor and an Engineer involved.
Was it not a Doctor of sorts who killed folk in a car jihad in Germany ?
It seems that the terrorist tendancy comes out in even the highly intelligent.
Perhaps being the more plausible, it makes them most dangerous of all.
OLD GUY says
Islam no matter the education level supports JIHAD, the destruction or enslavement of any who are not followers of islamic rule. When will the west realize that we are at WAR with the Muslim/Islamic enemies of our western civilization? Our mass migration of muslims/islamic mostly men is nothing but an invasion of islam into our countries that will result in a takeover of our citizens and civilization. STOP the MIGRATION INVASION!