“When the world of children comes to an end”

Over more than 30 years, Ghassan Abu Sitta has gained experience in war and crisis zones, leading to the development of a form of “conflict medicine” taught exclusively in Beirut. Israel has carried out attacks on the healthcare system in Gaza and also in Lebanon in a truly “spectacular manner” and with complete impunity, the doctor said in the interview. Humanitarian and international law are being flouted. The genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza is currently continuing against the population of Lebanon, Abu Sitta said. He recalled the “pager attacks” carried out by the Israeli Mossad on 17 September 2024, in which more than 3,000 people in Lebanon suffered severe injuries that would mark them for life.
    Israel has deliberately crossed all the red lines drawn after the Second World War and is being supported in this by the US and European states. “This means Israel is acting in their interests,” said Abu Sitta. This complicity must be clearly opposed. The fact that Abu Mohamed Al Jolani, a long-standing Al-Qaeda representative, has been exempted from US and UN sanctions, whilst judges at the International Criminal Court in The Hague and the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, are being punished with sanctions for calling the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians by its name, proves that international law is being undermined.
    International humanitarian and aid organisations in war and crisis zones are often deployed in conflicts that are also funded by their own governments. In light of the genocide in Gaza, a clear separation is necessary, according to Abu Sitta. What is needed is a “new social contract”, the doctor said. This is increasingly being discussed within humanitarian and aid organisations.

Karin Leukefeld: Ghassan Abu Sitta, you are Palestinian, but your homeland is occupied. Do you live in Beirut or do you live in the UK? As you are also Rector of the University of Glasgow?
Dr Ghassan Abu Sitta: I live between the two places. When I came out of Gaza, I tried to go back there a couple of times. The Israelis refused me entry. I had connections with the American University in Beirut, having been here between 2011 to 2019 as head of plastic surgery, very quickly we became aware that Israels war in Gaza is part of a much larger regional project to dominate and reshape the map of the region.
    Quickly we started seeing the war in Lebanon. I moved here on 17 September 2024 (day of the pager attack). I had been asked to take up the professor’s chair in conflict medicine, which is basically a reflection of the fact that we live in a region where war injuries are a major determinant of human health. A place like Lebanon and a hospital like the American University in Beirut, have specially been shaped by these injuries in their history.

You have set up a relief fund for Palestinian children from Gaza.
When we sat up the Ghassan Abu Sitta Children‘s Fund¹, the idea was that we were going to bring Palestinian children from Gaza, because the level of expertise and experience that exists here specially at the American University Hospital in Beirut in treating this kind of injuries, doesn’t exist outside military hospitals in the world. You will not find a civilian academic institution seen this much in terms of war injuries. Just the Lebanese wars, the Israeli invasions on Lebanon, but also from the war in Iraq and the war in Syria we had patients from Médecins sans Frontières, MSF, here for treatment.
    The complexitis of a lot of injuries that I have seen in Gaza needed the expertise of doctors, of people who had been working treating war injured children all of their lives. We started bringing children from Gaza through Egypt to here. When the war 2024 started in Lebanon, we started treating Lebanese children in addition to Palestinian children. And we have been doing that since then. So there are around 1.400 children who were wounded in the last Lebanon war (2024) And we were treating them, providing reconstructive surgery, rehabilitation and health support. At the same time we are bringing more children from Gaza to Lebanon for reconstructive surgery.

The number of treated children is high, how many doctors are working in your team?
What we do is, we use the whole of the American University Hospital in Beirut. Depending on the type of injuries. Some children need orthopaedic surgery, other children need ophtomologist, other children need plastic surgeons, it is depending on the type of injury. We have at our disposal a large number of specialties that may match the patient’s needs, depending of what the injury is. Since this war started, we have a project with UNICEF and the Ministry of Health and so we became the referring for all paediatric war injuries in Lebanon.

How old are your patients?
I operated on a seven-month-old yesterday and the oldest is 17, 18. We define a child that is 18 and below.

The sheer scale of the killing has reshaped Palestinian families

Part of the treatment of the Palestinian children is also, that after the surgery they can stay to recover with a guest family? Is that working?
We bring the families with them; a part of the family is with them. By nature of who Israel is allowed to leave Gaza is usually a single parent, that is with them. The devastation that is in Gaza, a lot of the time the parents have been killed. We have kids here who are being looked after by aunts or uncles or a single parent who survived or by the grandmother, who is the only surviving adult looking after them. The sheer scale of the killing has reshaped Palestinian families. That reflects who is able to (bring the children).

Did you give this kind of support also to children from Syria or from Iraq?
I had been involved in a similar project between 2012 and 2019 for war wounded children in Lebanon. Back then I was at the AUB as head of Plastic Surgery. We had a paediatric war injuries program for Syrian children. At that time, we had been treating also injured Iraqi children, but they had come through an agreement with the Iraqi Ministry of Health and the AUB-Hospital.

Their world has ended for these children

Are there similarities in the kind of injuries from the different countries, or are all of them different?
The pattern of injuries is different. Palestinian children in Gaza and Lebanese children are injured in their homes, almost uniform. Or in a car trying to run away from their homes. Which means that they invariably have lost siblings or parents or both. The injury is not just physical, but it is also emotional and social and existential. Their world has ended for these children, the world that they knew is gone. Their home, their family, their neighbourhood, their siblings, their school, everything. This scale of wounding we are seeing in this war in the Lebanese children, all have been wounded in their homes. Almost all of them have either lost parents or siblings.
    To the point where we now have a briefing team as part of the program. Because these kids, as they wake up from the intensive care period, then how do you tell them that their siblings have been killed? That their parents have been killed? So we have now a psychologist. One of our colleagues who works in the paediatric palliative care team in the hospital now started working with us. So that we can tell these children the bad news. Because you need to be able to kind of do it in cooperation with whoever is left in the family. And do it in the right kind of way.

AUB Hospital is a University Hospital. Do you also bring students of medicine into the project?
Yes, we have, we use the medical students at the AUB. The idea of the chair of conflict medicine is in itself an educational chair. It is in recognition that any doctor being trained in this region needs to be trained in the treatment of the health consequences of war. Because it is a major determinant of health. If you graduate tomorrow and you work in Palestine or Lebanon or Syria or Iraq or Libya, there is a good chance that you going to see that. And therefore, part of medical education we believe in our region has to involve this.

How do the students react, when they are working on the wounded children. Are there many, how do they cope?
You will be surprised; a lot of students want to do this. What we try to do is show, that an understanding of the social and psychological is just as important as the understanding of the clinical. We are trying to kind of shape their way of viewing war injuries.

They have probably never seen anything like those injuries, do they get support?
There is support. That was the agreement with the medical schools, that there is support. Specially as we have paediatric war injuries, that are even more difficult to deal with.

You said, in other countries war injuries are treated in military hospitals. But in Beirut it is, because there is a need?
Yes, and experience. For me the belief is, you can’t keep thinking this is the last war. The war to end all wars, so to speak …

… as it was said about the First World War, which resulted in “a peace to end all peace”² …
Yes.

When you spoke about your experience in Gaza 2023, you said this war will come to Lebanon …
Absolutely. It is obvious that Israel wants to turn everything South of the Litani River into Northern Gaza. Scorched earth, including the companies they are hiring to bulldoze the rubble in the villages, so there isn’t even any rubble left. Only flat land. It is 5000 Schekels per building, it is even the same amount, it is the same companies they paid for Beit Hanoun and Jabalia, they are paying for Khiam and Bint Jbeil.

Let us speak about this Chair of Conflict Medicine, which is somewhat extraordinary. We do not have it at European Universities. How did it start?
When I first came here in 2011, I noticed, that all the experience disappears with the generations that retire. My colleagues at the AUB who were treating the wounded, were trained in the civil war (unlike) the new guys who had just come back from the States or from Europe. The experience and the expertise had to be kept, had to be institutionalized. So that it stays in the hospital, in the university, to transfer the knowledge from one generation to the other. With the AUB I set up a program called Conflict Medicine program. With this we were looking at war injuries from a research point of view, from an educational point of view and from a clinical point of view. As I told you, we had a paediatric war injuries program for the Syrian kids and we had a partnership with the Iraqi Ministry of Health. This continued until the collapse of the banking system in Lebanon and I moved back to the UK.

Wars in the region have been raging for a long time – Syria, Iraq, Yemen. As a doctor you have been at many frontlines?
Yes, and when the war started again in Gaza 2023, there was a decision at the AUB to set out to do, what we were planning before. We needed a professorial chair of conflict medicine and embed it in the system. So I was approached by the AUB when I came out of Gaza. They asked, whether I would like to come back as Professor of Conflict Medicine. Specially as I have been the person who set up the Conflict Medicine program. And that was it.
    Now it is an evolving program and we need to enhance the name Conflict Medicine as a Post War Surgery. War Surgery is what it used to be called. It is assumed, that the doctor is the guy who treats the bullet or the bone. But actually, every special field in medicine is affected by the injury. Because you need ophtomologists, you need microbiologists, you need intensive care people, you need orthopaedic surgeries and vascular surgeries and so on. It is just like the idea that like the industrial revolution shaped modern medicine, wars are an upheaval of a similar magnitude that shapes medicine in all its fields.

Could you please explain that to a layman?
It is not about creating a new field but creating in each field an understanding of the specialty of war injuries, and the way, they manifest themselves. An ophtomologist needs to understand how the blast wave will burst the eye, how you best preserve how much you can, when shrapnel is inside the eye. An orthopaedic surgery needs to understand the difference between a traffic accident fracture and a blast fracture.
    Even the field of microbiology. We have a huge problem in the region with multidrugresistent bacteria. It was first described after 2003 by the Americans, they called it “Iraqibacter”. They used to see them in Iraqi soldiers coming back from Iraq with bacterial infections, but these bacteria were resistant to most antibiotics. But now, almost all war wounded in Gaza and in Lebanon have multidrugresistent infections. So everything about human health gets shaped and reshaped by war. That is the need to have a kind of someone dedicated within an academic institution that sees these patients to understanding this relationship.

Everything about human health
gets shaped and reshaped by war

Not only are you an experienced surgeon and professor at the American University and Hospital of Beirut, but you also speak publicly about the war and its consequences. On one occasion, you described European states as the ‘axis of genocide’ – why?
There is no doubt, that Israel could not have carried out the genocide in Gaza had it not been for the material support of certain states. The UK did not just give arms to Israel and financial support, 60 % of all electronic surveillance was done by Royal Airforce Planes coming out of Cyprus. When the Israelis would bomb Yemen, Italian Airforce Jets would refuel (and Italy would) allow to do that. The Americans supplied 80 % of weapons and ammunition, the Germans follow right after. And I do believe in the Edward Said term, it is “the dog that wags the tail”. Israel remains a settler’s colony of Western Imperialism. That is why it is supported by Western countries.

Some people in a similar position to you don’t speak out, or hardly ever do. You, on the other hand, speak your mind loud and clear – is that also a result of what you have experienced and witnessed over the decades?
Absolutely. I don’t think there is room for restraint after 22.000 children were killed with complete impunity, 64.000 children have been made orphans. When I was in Gaza I started writing this thing on the patients notes, a code (…) “wounded child no surviving family” – WCNSF – so that the social department workers at Shifa (Hospital) would feed them. Because the following day someone has to feed this child and look after them and change them. And that is a phenomenon I now see here and it is a phenomenon that I had not seen anywhere before. We must put an end to this systematic form of genocide. Gaza is not an isolated case. What is happening in Gaza will be replicated everywhere.

Thank you for this interview. •

The German version of the interview was first published by https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=150133 on 9 May 2026

¹https://gascf.org/

² Fromkin, David. A Peace to End All Peace, Holt Paperbacks, 2001; the PDF version is available in the Internet archive

* Karin Leukefeld is an ethnologist, scholar of Islam and political science, and historian. She has been working as a freelance correspondent since 2000. Her main areas of focus are the Near and Middle East. Her latest book is entitled “War in the Middle East: Geopolitics, Devastation, Resistance and the Awakening of a Region” (Hintergrund-Verlag 2024)
Ghassan Abu Sitta is a surgeon specialising in plastic surgery. As a volunteer for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), Abu Sitta has worked in many war zones and crisis areas. Since 2024, he has headed the newly established Chair of “Conflict Medicine” at the American University of Beirut (AUB).