The second annual People’s Conference for Palestine took place in Detroit from August 29 to 31, featuring leaders from all sectors of the global movement for Palestine.

Among the prominent featured speakers was British-Palestinian doctor Ghassan Abu Sitta, who spoke at a plenary titled “Gaza resists, Gaza remains.” As Dr. Abu Sitta explained, since serving as a doctor in Gaza during the “Marches of Return” in 2018 to 2019, he has been banned from visiting the United States, despite having a British passport, and joined the session via zoom.

As a doctor who has served in Gaza since Israel began its genocidal assault on the enclave in October 2023, Abu Sitta’s perspective is that Israel’s mass starvation of Gaza is a way that the Zionist state can “weaponize people’s bodies against themselves.”

“The famine that Israel has manufactured means that my colleagues are now reporting the patients are not surviving surgeries, that they should be surviving. Because when they’re injured, they’re two malnourished to withstand the trauma or to heal the wound after the surgery. The surgeons and the doctors and the nurses are too malnourished to be able to finish these shifts, to work to help these people,” Dr. Abu Sitta describes.

Ghassan Abu Sitta addresses the People’s Conference for Palestine (Photo via PC4P)

Read Dr. Ghassan Abu Sitta’s address below:

It was very clear from the very beginning of this genocide that Israel had really reinvented the idea of scorched earth.

The health system is not just to be attacked, but to be dismantled. And by that I mean we started on the 12th of October with phone calls to every medical director of every hospital in Gaza, ordering them to evacuate these hospitals, otherwise they would bear the responsibility for the imminent attacks. And this was October 2023. And on the 17th of October, Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital, [was attacked] where an Israeli missile was fired into the forecourt of the hospital, killing 483 civilians.

And then the systematic destruction that followed. The three pediatric hospitals in the north, then the first siege of Shifa, and so on and so forth. Until now, we were left with three partially functioning hospitals out of 39.

And this is despite the fact that every time the Israelis have destroyed the hospital, our Palestinian colleagues have reopened it. The Indonesian hospital, which is in Jabalia, was fixed three times by our colleagues and reopened. Al Awda hospital in Jabalia camp kept working until only a month ago until it was forced to close, despite being shelled, despite having snipers fired into it, despite losing three of its doctors in an Israeli missile attack, despite the arrest of its medical director, Dr. Ahmed Muhanna.

We then have the systematic murder of a whole generation of health workers. So now over 1,600 have been killed. The most recent is the head of pediatrics at Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis. But also from early October, we were working in Shifa [hospital], and every day, one of our colleagues would be killed within half an hour of going home to their house.

It was first, Dr. Medhat Saidam, a plastic surgeon working with us at the Burns Unit and then Dr. Hammam Alloh. And now we have a horrendous number. We have whole specialties that have been completely wiped out.

And then, having taken out the human element to create the conditions for death, you weaponize water and sewage by also, from the very beginning, from October 23, bombing the water desalination plants in Gaza, and the sewage treatment plants in Gaza, and then systematically destroying the water and sewage infrastructure so that we have rare diseases on epidemic levels. Guillain-Barré syndrome, which is a virus, we have over 85 cases in Gaza.

And then at the end, to weaponize people’s bodies against themselves. The famine that Israel has manufactured means that my colleagues are now reporting the patients are not surviving surgeries, that they should be surviving. Because when they’re injured, they’re too malnourished to withstand the trauma or to heal the wound after the surgery. The surgeons and the doctors and the nurses are too malnourished to be able to finish these shifts, to work to help these people.

What Israel has done is recreate a machinery of genocide where everything is weaponized. From the water, to the sewage, to the buildings, to every little thing. So unlike what the published numbers are, 64,000 traumatic deaths that have been registered, the real numbers are more likely closer to 400,000, more than 12% to 15% of Gaza’s population.

Because Israel was able to weaponize life itself as part of its genocidal project.

The post Dr. Ghassan Abu Sitta: “Israel was able to weaponize life itself” appeared first on Peoples Dispatch.

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