Abu Sittah said on the X social network that he had been invited to tell French senators about his experience as a doctor in the Gaza Strip after the Israeli attack, but was detained by Charles de Gaulle in Roissy, Paris. In the airport.
He was already denied entry to Germany last month, where he had hoped to attend a “Palestinian congress” along with former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, who was also denied entry.
“I’m at Charles de Gaulle airport. They don’t allow me to enter France,” G. Abu Sittah wrote on the X platform. – “Today I should speak in the French Senate. They say that the Germans banned me from coming to Europe for 1 year.”
A French police source confirmed to AFP that France could not allow the doctor to enter the country because of Germany’s ban on him entering the visa-free Schengen zone, which both countries share.
Last month, Abu Sittah said he had been barred from entering Germany in April, accusing German officials of stifling free speech.
Mr Abu Sittah told X in another statement that “the French authorities are not allowing me to use the earlier flight and are insisting on sending me on the last flight back to London”, calling the measure “an act of total revenge”.
He said that “Fortress Europe” “silences the witnesses of the genocide and Israel kills them in prisons”.
The event, in which Mr. Abu Sittah was supposed to participate, was organized by Senator Raymonde Poncet Monge, a member of the Green Party.
Guillaume Gontard, chairman of the Greens group in the Senate, called the decision to deny Mr. Abu Sittah scandalous and said he was negotiating with the Interior and Foreign Ministries to reverse the decision. But he added that the doctor would probably be sent back to Britain.
Mr. Abu Sittah spent 43 days in the Gaza Strip, also in the largest Palestinian territory, at al-Shifa hospital.
In early April, Israeli forces withdrew from the hospital compound, saying they had been fighting Palestinian militants there for two weeks.
In April, the World Health Organization (WHO) said al-Shifa hospital had been reduced to ashes by an Israeli siege last month, leaving the site an “empty shell” with many bodies.
