Palestinian doctor who was going to talk about the war denied entry to France

Paris. A well-known Palestinian-British surgeon who worked as a volunteer in hospitals in the Gaza Strip declared that he had been denied entry into France on Saturday to participate in a French Senate meeting on the war between Israel and Hamas. Authorities did not want to give a reason for the decision.

Dr. Ghassan Abu Sitta was placed in a holding area at Charles de Gaulle Airport and will be expelled, according to French Senator Raymonde Poncet Monge, who had invited him to speak in the Senate.

“It’s a shame,” he published in X.

Abu Sitta posted on social media that he had been denied entry to France because Germany had banned him from entering Europe for a year. Germany denied him entry last month, and France and Germany are part of Europe’s borderless Schengen area. He noted that he was being sent back to London.

The French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of the Interior, as well as the local police and the Paris airport authority did not want to comment on what happened or provide explanations.

Abu Sitta had been invited by the left-wing French group Ecologists to speak at a colloquium on Saturday in the French Senate on the situation in the Gaza Strip, according to the Senate’s press service. The event included testimonies from doctors, journalists and international legal experts with experience in Gaza.

Last month, Abu Sitta was denied entry into Germany to participate in a pro-Palestinian conference. He claimed he was stopped at passport control, detained for several hours and then told he had to return to the UK. He claimed that airport police told him they were denying him entry for “the safety of conference attendees and public order.”

Abu Sitta, who was most recently a Doctors Without Borders volunteer in Gaza, has worked during multiple conflicts in the Palestinian territories since the late 1980s, during the first Palestinian uprising. He has also worked in other conflict zones, such as Iraq, Syria and Yemen.

France has been experiencing tensions related to the Middle East conflict almost daily since the deadly Hamas incursion into Israel on October 7. In recent days and weeks, police have evicted students from French campuses holding demonstrations and sit-ins similar to those on U.S. college campuses.