About this Event
The accelerated Israeli assault on Palestinian life and land has reached unprecedented levels of destruction, with Palestine’s health and education sectors being deliberate targets in Gaza and wider Palestine. As we witness the systematic displacement and annihilation of Palestinians fighting to exist and remain on their land, what is the responsibility of scholars and academic institutions to witness and act under times of genocide? What can be done to support the sanctity of all forms of life in Gaza amidst this phase of infrastructural, cultural and material erasure in a century-long history of settler colonial dispossession? This event brings into view the scale and impact of Israel’s on-going attack on Gaza and settler colonial violence across wider Palestine from the vantage point of health and education. As physicians and scholars who work in these fields, Dr Samia Al-Botmeh (Birzeit University) and Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah will address the impact of the last five months in Gaza and the rest of Palestine.
Speakers:
Dr Samia Al-Botmeh is an assistant professor in economics at the Faculty of Business and Economics/ Birzeit University. She was the director for the Centre for Development Studies at Birzeit University till 2014. She worked with the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute (MAS) in Ramallah as a researcher. She has completed her PhD at the School of African and Oriental Studies- University of London, in labour economics. Areas of interest and publications are gender economics, labour economics, and political economy of development. She has engaged in research on alternatives to neo-liberal development in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and gender differentials in labour market outcomes.
Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah is a British-Palestinian Associate Professor of Surgery and a Plastic & Reconstructive Surgeon. He completed his medical education at University of Glasgow in the U.K and his postgraduate residency training in London. In 2011 he was recruited by the American University of Beirut Medical Center. In 2012 he became Head of the Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at the AUBMC, Clinical Lead of its Pediatric War injuries program and War Injuries Multidisciplinary Clinic. In 2015 co-founded and became director of the Conflict Medicine Program at Global Health Institute at the American University of Beirut. He is an Honorary Senior Clinical Lecturer at the Center for Blast Injury Studies at Imperial College University of London. He is Clinical Lead for the Operational Trauma Initiative at the World Health Organization’s EMRO Office and serves on the board of directors of INARA, a charity dedicated to providing reconstructive surgery to war injured children in the Middle East, and Board of Trustees of the UK based Medical Aid for Palestinians. He has worked as a war surgeon in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, South Lebanon and during the 4 wars in the Gaza Strip. On the 9th of October 2023 he entered the Gaza Strip and worked in Shifa Hospital and then Al- Ahli-Baptist Hospital for 43 days during the current. Evidence he provided was part of the South African submission to the International Court of Justice.
This event is co-organised with British Society for Middle Eastern Studies Campaigns (BRISMES) and British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (BRICUP) as part of “Campus Voices for Palestine.” It has been co-sponsored by Edinburgh Centre for Medical Anthropology (EdCMA), Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH), Alwaleed Centre, IMES (Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies), PIR-MERG (Middle East Research Group) and RACE.ED.
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Please note that there may be photography taking place at this event.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
To be confirmed, George Square, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
GBP 0.00