Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sitta appears ill at ease as he stares at the cup of coffee sitting on the table in front of him. “My mind is elsewhere ... I’m overwhelmed with a sense of sadness,” he says. It’s been a little bit more than a week since Abu-Sitta, chief plastic surgeon at the American University of Beirut Medical Center, returned from a medical mission at the Al-Shifa Hospital in the Gaza Strip. The transition, he says, has not been easy. “I feel extremely restless,” he admits. “It’s more difficult than I thought it was going to be ... just to get back into the swing of normal life.”

Since his return to Beirut, Abu-Sitta’s mind strays frequently to the scenes of suffering in Gaza, he says. “It weighs heavily, I can’t get it out of my mind.” It was the seventh time Abu-Sitta had traveled to Palestine on a medical mission, but the scenes he witnessed on this trip to Gaza were, he says, unprecedentedly grim. Abu-Sitta was born in Kuwait to a Palestinian father and a Lebanese mother. In 1987, he moved to the United Kingdom, where he became a citizen. [Link]