The tale of Ghassan Abu Sitta and his undead patients
What would you do during a genocide?
I no longer need to ask myself that question. Because I know now. I will sit in a cinema with my daughter watching The Exorcist. By such means am I forfeiting my humanity.
Tonight (Friday, October 27), there are 60,000 civilians cowering in Al-Shifa Hospital and the Israeli government is threatening to bomb it. Doctors are operating on the wounded without anaesthetic. While Gaza cries out for salvation, I lose myself in the imaginarium of the diabolical.
Gaza has gone dark. The last time Dr Ghassan Abu Sitta, the heroic surgeon of Ahli-Baptist and Shifa hospitals, made contact with the outside world was five hours ago. Six hours before that, he was telling CNN “President Joe Biden is basically telling the Israelis they haven’t killed enough Palestinians and there is more room for slaughter…
“What is the quota for Palestinian blood that the US administration wants for it to force Israelis into a ceasefire?”
Then, the Israeli government upped the stakes. As the US ambassador was addressing the United Nations, defending the onslaught on 2.3 million captive people, the Israeli military cut Gaza’s last remaining phone network and sent its missiles in. The human rights group Al-Mezan says “ambulances and civil defense teams will not be able to locate the injured or people stuck under rubble,” because nobody can now call an ambulance.
Al Jazeera’s chief correspondent Wael al-Dahdouh says of Gaza tonight “We are not fine, body parts are everywhere, missiles are targeting everyone, and the bombing hasn’t stopped for a second.”
Last night, Wael lost much of his family in an Israeli air strike, including his wife, his fifteen-year-old son Mahmoud, his seven-year-old daughter Sham and his grandson Adam, who was all of 18-months.
Wael should keep his chin up though, because Joe Biden says he doesn’t believe there are 7,000 Palestinians dead, or that there are 1,600 others missing, entombed below the rubble. He doesn’t believe that more than 3,000 children have been slaughtered. His spokesperson says the Ministry of Health in Gaza is a “so-called” health ministry, not a real one, and therefore is presumably incapable of counting the dead.
I think Joe Biden has a point. Can these seven thousand souls really be dead when they were never even given a chance to live? When you sentence someone to an indefinite period in an open air prison, wall them up and give them just about enough to survive on, does it count when you finally snuff them out? Or maybe Joe, a great fella for remembering the wrongs done to his ancestral homeland, just couldn’t give a fuck when the victims are brown.
Although the phone lines are down and no ambulances can be called, there’s no one to save anyway, least of all the undead, because they’re not dying according to Joe, not really. It’s a “so-called” death these Palestinians suffer. Nothing but propaganda. No need to worry.
In Shifa or Ahli-Baptist hospital, Ghassan Abu Sitta sometimes operates for three days at a time, then showers, sleeps, and goes back to it because the conveyor belt of Palestine’s undead refuses to slow down.
Somehow, he also finds the time to tweet the words of James Baldwin, “The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.”