The Witness No One Cross-Examines

Few professionals command public trust like physicians. Years of intense training, genuine expertise, and the Hippocratic Oath with its central command to do no harm establish the doctor as an honest and credible witness equipped to tell us what we cannot judge for ourselves. That trust gives a physician’s testimony great force, especially during wartime. And it is why a physician poses particular danger when he or she chooses to become a combatant on the propaganda front. Throughout the Hamas-Israel war, Hamas has conscripted the authority of healthcare professionals into its service to prop up its slanderous libels and lend the prestige of the profession to its propaganda. A case in point is the international group Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) and the British-Palestinian surgeon it helped elevate into a hero, Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah.

Abu-Sittah is no reluctant bystander pulled into politics. Even before he became a fixture on Western broadcasts, his public record revealed him as a committed partisan.

Much of this record was catalogued when, in December 2023, UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) asked Britain’s medical regulator, the General Medical Council (GMC), to examine Abu-Sittah’s conduct, with follow-up letters dated January 29, May 11, and June 24, 2024. The organization cited a series of Abu Sittah’s social-media posts and a 2018 article Abu-Sittah had written for the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar. In his article, the doctor blamed “the Zionist occupation forces” for “the martyrdom of resistance fighter Ahmad Nassar Jarrar”, whom he hailed as “the hero of the Nablus operation” (referring to the January 9, 2018 drive-by shooting in which Rabbi Raziel Shevach, a father of six and a volunteer medic, was murdered by a terror cell Jarrar headed). And he concluded that “the people have no weapon left but revolutionary violence.” [1]

The social media posts cited included a March 2022 image of a masked gunman charging forward with a machine gun under the slogan “nous vaincrons” (“we will win”). Another depicted two gun-toting, masked men, one crouching in an intimidating manner, the other standing. And others were re-posts eulogizing or celebrating slain members of the terrorist group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), including the group’s own co-founder and a military commander said to have plotted to bomb an Israeli bus. One re-post celebrated a deadly terrorist attack near Kiryat Arba, carried out in October 2022 by a member of Hamas’ military wing, a proscribed terror group in the UK. [2] The UKLFI complaint argued that the posts and article by Abu Sittah were antisemitic and supported anti-Israel violence and terrorism.

In January 2026, a Medical Practitioners Tribunal (MPT) dismissed the misconduct case against the physician, stating that Abu Sittah’s article in Al Akhbar must be viewed through the lens of the Arabic-reading audience it was intended for, who would understand it as “criticism of the Palestinian Authorities and Zionist occupation forces” rather than as “hostility towards Jewish people as a group.” The re-posts eulogizing terrorists and praising their attacks, the tribunal claimed, constituted a “celebration of the anniversary of the brothers and comrades of two organizations of resistance in Palestine.” It further contended that it could not determine exactly when the celebratory messages were posted and thus could not say that the organizations were necessarily proscribed at the time. Therefore, it ruled that the posts would not be construed as giving “material or moral aid to the commission of terrorist acts.” [3] This decision by the MPT was highly touted by Abu Sittah, his lawyers and supporters who claimed that it completely exonerated him.

A GMC panel, however, disagreed with the MPT findings, suggesting they were “wrong” and based on improper analysis. Contrary to the MPT findings, the GMC panel observed that there was factual evidence the posts were made when the organizations were already outlawed as terrorist groups and that Abu Sittah’s posts and article objectively appeared to support violence and terrorism. It argued that a doctor in Abu Sittah’s senior position engaging in such conduct put at risk the maintenance of public confidence and proper professional standards and therefore moved to appeal the MPT ruling to the High Court. [4]

As of late March 2026, a second regulatory body, the UK’s Professional Standards Authority for Health and Social Care (PSA), joined GMC’s appeal to the High Court against the tribunal’s ruling to clear Abu Sittah. [5] As of this writing, the High Court appeal hearing for the joint case brought by the GMC and PSA against Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah is scheduled for January 26–27, 2027.

The question of whether Abu Sittah should retain his UK medical license aside, however, there is no doubt that Abu Sittah cannot be considered a neutral or reliable witness to the conflict. The MPT never denied that the doctor authored the article in Al Akhbar or that he memorialized members of armed factions against Israel. A person whose published writing defends “revolutionary violence” and whose social media pages honor Hamas fighters against Israeli Jews can hardly be considered a reliable or objective witness about the Hamas-Israel war. While the tribunal ruled that Abu Sittah has the right to hold those views, it did not address the reliability of his accounts of wrongdoing by the IDF or his allegations of an Israeli-perpetrated genocide. And on that question, it is his own conduct that supplies the answer.

The Al-Ahli claim

On October 17, 2023, an explosion struck the grounds of Gaza’s Al-Ahli Arab Hospital. Within minutes, Hamas’s health ministry announced that an Israeli airstrike had killed nearly 500 people sheltering there. Abu-Sittah, an MSF physician, presenting himself as an eyewitness, spoke at a press conference near the hospital organized by the Hamas-run health ministry and became one of the most-quoted authenticators of that claim. He spoke of a “massacre,” recounted that the ceiling had collapsed onto the operating room, and told the world this was a deliberate Israeli attack on patients and children. [6]

It was not. American, French, Canadian, and British intelligence services, together with independent munitions analysts, concluded that the blast came from a rocket misfired by a Palestinian armed group, that it landed in the courtyard rather than inside the hospital, and that the death toll was a fraction of the number Hamas broadcast — credible estimates ran from the low dozens to a few hundred, nowhere near 500. [7][8] Even Human Rights Watch, hardly a defender of Israel, judged the explosion to be consistent with a Palestinian-type rocket striking the hospital grounds. [9]

But Abu-Sittah never retracted. On the contrary. He dug in his heels and continued to present the event as an Israeli massacre, recycling the perverse claim that Israel’s warnings to evacuate hospitals were themselves proof of genocidal intent, even though this demonstrated quite the opposite: A warning to leave is the reverse of an effort to kill. Pressed on the evidence of a misfire by an affiliated terrorist group, Abu Sittah asserted that Palestinian rockets “don’t have that kind of destructive power,” [10] a line contradicted by years of documented deaths from exactly such weapons. [11] In an interview with Legal Agenda, an Arab advocacy organization sympathetic to Abu Sittah, he voiced his displeasure with Human Rights Watch’s inconvenient conclusions, dismissing them as baseless and complaining that the organization had still not withdrawn its report. [12]

This is not how a witness behaves when he is following the evidence. It is how an advocate behaves when he is defending a verdict he decided on long before the smoke clears.

From witness to icon

And yet Abu-Sittah was not discredited by his false account. If anything, it elevated him. He has since been called to give evidence to the International Criminal Court [13] and has given testimony to a war-crimes unit at Scotland Yard, [14] spoken at an event hosted by Amnesty International UK, [15] lectured at universities, and watched his “eyewitness” framing become part of the body of “evidence” assembled to charge Israel with genocide. The 2024 documentary A State of Passion, made by his close friends Carol Mansour and Muna Khalidi, casts Abu Sittah as a heroic and authoritative witness whose testimony belongs on the world stage — including before the International Court of Justice. [16] Festival audiences, a sympathetic press, and the film itself treat his word as self-authenticating. The one thing almost no one does is cross-examine it or acknowledge his anti-Israel agenda.

This is how the laundering works. A claim that begins as Hamas propaganda is echoed by a physician, amplified by a self-styled humanitarian medical group, and repeated in journals and broadcasts. The physician is lionized in a film that casts him as the moral voice of his time. Each retelling adds an additional layer of authority, until the original falsehood is accepted as unimpeachable testimony.

When the canard reaches the museum wall

The clearest sign that a propaganda narrative has succeeded is that mainstream institutions with no business adjudicating a war begin to recite it as conventional wisdom. Consider the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which, as Andrea Levin documented in the Boston Herald, has repeatedly lent the institution’s name to the genocide charge. [17] The film about Abu Sittah was screened at the museum on Oct. 24, 2025 [18]. In the program for the Palestinian Film Festival it co-sponsors, the museum described a slate of short films as capturing the experience of a people struggling to survive “through two years of genocide.” [19] And in an author’s note attached to a photography exhibit — text accompanying a single staged image of a Palestinian woman seated in a taxi, a picture with no bearing whatever on the question — the museum’s senior curator of photographs, Kristen Gresh, informed visitors that a United Nations commission of inquiry and “many international scholars have concluded that the State of Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza.” [20]

In other words, the most damning accusation in international law was presented not as a politicized, contested and legally unsupported allegation, but as settled fact.

What visitors do not learn is that the charge is fiercely disputed among scholars, legal experts, and governments. Leading military authorities reject it outright: John Spencer, who chairs urban-warfare studies at West Point’s Modern War Institute — the same scholar whose analysis of hospital protections dismantles so much of the case against Israel — points to the absence of genocidal intent, Israel having stated repeatedly that its war is against Hamas and not the Palestinian population; to civilian-protection and humanitarian measures without precedent in the conduct of modern warfare; and to a ratio of civilian to combatant deaths that is, by the grim standards of urban combat, historically low. [21] In March 2026 the United States filed a declaration with the International Court of Justice affirming “in the strongest terms possible, that the allegations of ‘genocide’ against Israel are false.” [22]

The visitor reading a label on a museum wall is simply informed that the matter is decided. That is the danger of political propaganda. The genocide charge flips the narrative, erasing not only Hamas’s own genocidal actions against Israel but its dangerous conduct among the Palestinians.  It is Hamas that puts Palestinian civilian lives in danger by using hospitals, schools, and homes to store weapons and shelter fighters and which embeds its fighters among civilians.  The reversal of the narrative rests, in no small part, on the type of “eyewitness” testimony that Abu-Sittah’s Al-Ahli performance exemplifies.  

The real injury

One can sympathize with the plight of Gaza’s civilians without requiring embellishment of fact and outright invention. When civilian suffering is exploited like this, with the wrong party blamed and falsehoods peddled as established fact, their cause is betrayed. This is particularly true when the stories being amplified have already been dismantled — by intelligence agencies, by munitions experts, and by human rights organizations that are themselves sympathetic to the Palestinians.

The free pass given to Dr. Abu-Sittah—by journalists who accept his word without challenge, filmmakers who treat him like a saint, and museums that echo his claims—is no tribute to medicine. It’s the degradation of medical and cultural institutions to dangerous propaganda platforms. When a surgeon’s scrubs or a museum’s platform are used to validate a predetermined verdict against the Jewish state, we lose what made those institutions trustworthy to begin with: the obligation to tell the truth. 

Notes

1. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, “الشعب الفلسطيني والسلطة ولحظة الحقيقة” (“The Palestinian People, the Authority, and the Moment of Truth”), Al-Akhbar (Beirut), Mar. 8, 2018
   https://www.al-akhbar.com/Opinion/245766/
2. UK Lawyers for Israel, “Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah continues to be investigated by the GMC,” Aug. 30, 2024, https://www.uklfi.com/dr-ghassan-abu-sittah-continues-to-be-investigated-by-the-gmc.
3. Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS) Record of Determinations, Jan. 9, 2026 https://www.mpts-uk.org/-/media/mpts-rod-files/dr-ghassan-abu-sitta-09-jan-26.pdf
4. Meeting of the s.40A Panel to consider the case of Dr Ghassan Abu-Sitta (4066600), Feb. 5, 2026 https://www.gmc-uk.org/cdn/documents/20260205-abu-sitta-final_pdf-113804342.pdf
5. Clare Dyer, “Abu-Sitta case: New regulator joins appeal effort on doctor cleared of supporting terrorism,” BMJ 2026; 392. https://www.bmj.com/content/392/bmj.s495
6. Abu-Sittah’s “massacre” and operating-room accounts were carried widely on Oct. 17–18, 2023, including BBC News, “London doctor in Gaza says hospital ceiling fell in after blast,” Oct. 18, 2023, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-67142786, and in Médecins Sans Frontières social-media statements of Oct. 17, 2023.
7. ABC News (Patrick Reevell), Oct. 24, 2023, https://abcnews.go.com/International/us-initial-independent-review-shows-evidence-bomb-strike/story?id=104126146 (United States); Associated Press, Oct. 22, 2023, https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-france-intelligence-7be0d59b9ceb58bbf2f03c5dc8222356 (France); Department of National Defence (Canada), Oct. 21, 2023, https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/news/2023/10/statement-from-the-department-of-national-defence-and-the-canadian-armed-forces-on-the-recent-strike-at-al-ahli-hospital-in-gaza.html;
   The Guardian (Patrick Wintour), Oct. 23, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/23/gaza-hospital-blast-caused-by-militants-rocket-uk-intelligence-sunak-israel-palestine (United Kingdom).
8. Reuters, “US intel says Gaza hospital death toll likely between 100 and 300,” Oct. 19, 2023, https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-intel-says-gaza-hospital-death-toll-likely-between-100-300-2023-10-19; AFP-cited European intelligence estimate of 10–50, Le Point, Oct. 19, 2023, https://www.lepoint.fr/monde/hopital-a-gaza-incertitudes-sur-le-nombre-de-victimes-19-10-2023-2540039_24.php.
9. Human Rights Watch, “Gaza: Findings on October 17 al-Ahli Hospital Explosion,” Nov. 26, 2023, https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/11/26/gaza-findings-october-17-al-ahli-hospital-explosion.
10. Middle East Eye / Real Talk interview, Dec. 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1w7RDWueiM.
11. Human Rights Watch, “Gaza: Palestinian Rockets in May Killed Civilians in Israel, Gaza,” Aug. 12, 2021, https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/08/12/palestinian-rockets-may-killed-civilians-israel-gaza
12. Saada Allaw and Nour Kelzi, Legal Agenda: “Ghassan Abu Sitta: Genocide in Gaza,” Jan. 29, 2024, https://english.legal-agenda.com/ghassan-abu-sitta-genocide-in-gaza
13. AFP, “UK-Palestinian surgeon fights for ‘justice’ after Gaza return,” France 24, Jan. 8, 2024, https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20240108-uk-palestinian-surgeon-fights-for-justice-after-gaza-return.
14. VOA (AP), “Surgeon Gives Testimony to UK War Crimes Unit After Gaza Visit,” Dec. 10, 2023, https://www.voanews.com/a/surgeon-gives-testimony-to-uk-war-crimes-unit-after-gaza-visit-/7391669.html
15. Amnesty International UK, “Surgeon working in Gaza speaks out | Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah,” May 1, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZhYI9N-jBY.
16. A State of Passion (2024), dir. Carol Mansour and Muna Khalidi; see Sheffield DocFest, https://www.sheffdocfest.com/film/state-passion (describing him as a witness bringing first-hand experience “to the world stage, including the International Court of Justice”), and KPBS, Apr. 3, 2025, https://www.kpbs.org/news/arts-culture/2025/04/03/san-diego-arab-film-festival-highlights-oscar-winning-documentary-and-stories-from-gaza-west-bank.
17.  Andrea Levin, “Boston MFA endorses ‘Gaza genocide’ claim,” Boston Herald, April 28, 2026.
18.  MFA Boston screening: A State of Passion, Oct. 24, 2025 https://www.mfa.org/event/film/a-state-of-passion#
19. Shorts Program: A BPFF Homage to Gaza”  mfa.org/event/film/shorts-program-a-bpff-homage-to-gaza
20. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, “Sūmud” (author’s note accompanying Luc Delahaye’s Taxi, 2016), https://www.mfa.org/article/2024/sumud.
21. John Spencer, “Hospitals Are Protected Under International Law. But They Cannot Be ‘Off Limits,'” Newsweek, Feb. 21, 2024, https://www.newsweek.com/hospitals-are-protected-under-international-law-they-cannot-off-limits-opinion-1871757.
22.  United States of America, Declaration of Intervention under Article 63 of the Statute, filed Mar. 12, 2026, in Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel), International Court of Justice, https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/192/192-20260312-int-02-00-en.pdf