On Friday 9 January, the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MTPS), which conducts hearings to determine whether doctors are ‘fit to practise’, threw out the misconduct case against Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah. The case was brought by the General Medical Council (GMC), following complaints from UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI). The MTPS concluded that the material before the panel did not support violence, terrorism or antisemitism and there was no intention of any of these by Abu Sittah.
Dr Abu Sittah is a Palestinian British doctor, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon and a leader in the field of war surgery, who was elected Rector of Glasgow University in 2024. He has been pursued for two years by UKLFI. Had he not had to appear at the tribunal, he would have been continuing his work in Beirut, operating on those who suffered life-changing injuries as a result of the terrorist Israeli pager attacks on civilians in September 2024.
The case against Dr Abu Sittah
This is UKLFI’s tenth legal action against Abu Sittah. It was first heard by an Interim Orders Tribunal which found no evidence that patient safety was at risk, but UKLFI continued to submit complaints. This time UKLFI was humiliated; the GMC lawyer was out of her depth, cross-examining the doctor about an article in Arabic published in a newspaper in 2018 and two reposts on twitter/X in 2020, both in Arabic and containing images.
As Abu Sittah’s lawyer said, it is hard to think of harsher accusations against a doctor with 30 years of good practice, who puts himself at risk and travels to war zones to treat war victims for free, than those of being an antisemitic supporter of terrorism, violence and proscribed organisation. This is the trope of the Palestinian, the Muslim, who hates Jews and loves violence and terror.
Abu Sittah was eloquent, proud and calm as he was cross-examined. He said ‘a physician has the advantage of knowing how politics shapes, injures and contorts human health and this gives a particular insight’.
Having survived the devastating attack on Al Ahli Hospital in Gaza on 17 October 2023, only days into the genocide, in which 753 civilians were slaughtered, Abu Sittah gave a press conference surrounded by the bodies of dead adults and children. He was subsequently a witness at the International Court of Justice in the case brought against Israel by South Africa, and at the International Criminal Court, regarding the arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu. Zionists are determined to make him pay the price for this.
The GMC lawyer spent a lot of time trying to find fault with the retweeted images, allowing Abu Sittah to eloquently explain the meaning of the article and the posters (one from Iran in the early 1970s) he had retweeted. He spoke of the movement in solidarity with Palestine historically and made it clear that the struggle of the Palestinians is understood in the context of the struggle for justice of the oppressed against their oppressors.
To determine if offence had been caused, the tribunal considered who would be the ‘ordinary reasonable reader’ who would have seen these articles and retweets with images and Arabic writing. Abu Sittah’s lawyer pointed out that most ‘ordinary reasonable’ Arabic speakers would recognise George Habash, founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine but would not recognise a picture that was half Jeremy Corbyn and half Nigel Farage, and vice versa for a British counterpart. Likewise, the Arabic reader would know that the Iranian revolution took place in 1979, while the British counterpart would know that England won the world cup in 1966, and not vice versa.
UKLFI doing the British government’s dirty work
UKLFI is an arm of the establishment and works in sync with the pro-Zionist British Labour government to silence those standing for the rights of the Palestinian people, against occupation and against genocide. It uses ‘lawfare’ in a war of attrition to wear down supporters of Palestine and deter solidarity.
UKLFI boasts of successfully compelling a hospital to remove artwork by Palestinian children and forcing the British wheelchair basketball team to apologise for turning their backs on the Israeli team. It was UKLFI which lobbied the Metropolitan Police to arrest and prosecute the SOAS 2 under the Terrorism Act. No attack or lie is too disgusting for it – in May 2025 UKLFI Chief Executive Jonathan Turner responded to an article in The Lancet about starvation in Gaza and a subsequent motion to the Co-Operative Society AGM urging Co-Op stores to stop stocking Israeli produce, by claiming that, far from create starvation, the Zionist onslaught had done a service to the people of Gaza in assisting to combat obesity.
UKLFI is currently under investigation itself. The Public Interest Law Centre has filed a complaint with the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) against UKLFI director Caroline Turner, alleging serious breaches of the SRA’s Principles and Code of Conduct including their use of ‘Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation’ to intimidate and silence Palestine solidarity work.
A victory for solidarity
The likes of UKLFI deliberately conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism to hinder the fight for justice for the Palestinians. It is not antisemitic to criticise a settler-colonial state, supported, armed and funded by the most powerful imperialist nations, and currently waging genocide against an imprisoned, starving and homeless – yet still brave and defiant – population in Gaza, destroying all health care infrastructure and deliberately killing doctors, nurses, paramedics.
The tribunal outcome is a huge victory for the movement in solidarity with Palestine. The GMC legal team argued that Abu Sittah had crossed a line, the tribunal found he had not. It is not the right of the GMC to police people’s political views. Abu Sittah says that many people trust doctors more than they trust politicians and that increased trust brings increased responsibilities. But silence in the face of injustice is a form of complicity and while medical staff in Gaza face torture and murder by the Israeli occupying forces, there cannot be silence.
Defend the right to defend Palestine!
