Abu Sitta was born in 1937 into a Palestinian family with a long tradition of fierce resistance to occupiers of their land. Since 1922, the land had been under the jurisdiction of the British, under the provision of the British Mandate for Palestine. Prior to this, the Ottomans had ruled the region for five hundred years. Much land was controlled by absentee landlords. Abu Sitta's family's land and the village bore their name, Ma'in Abu Sitta, in Beer Sheba District of Palestine. One morning in April 1948, he and other schoolboys were sent home for safety reasons, after being summoned by the headmaster and told that the Jews had occupied central Palestine.Civil war had broken out between Arabs and Jews following the United Nations Partition Plan of 29 November 1947, which had recommended the creation of independent Arab and Jewish States in Mandatory Palestine. The Arabs immediately rejected the plan and violent attacks on Jewish communities followed. Fighting intensified in the centre of Mandatory Palestine in March, hence the decision of Abu Sitta's headmaster. Abu Sitta made the 40 km journey from Beer Sheba town back to his home on foot, and joined his family. Before the declaration of the State of Israel on 14 May 1948, the neighbouring Arab states, Egypt, Transjordan, Syria and Iraq threatened the new Jewish state with invasion and the fighting further intensified. Just before the Israeli declaration in mid-May, the family was attacked by the Jewish militia, and they fled to the Gaza Strip. Immediately after the declaration, the neighbouring Arab states attacked. The Egyptian force, the largest among the Arab armies, invaded from the South. On 15 May 1948, the Egyptians attacked two Jewish settlements, using artillery, armoured cars carrying cannons, tanks and aircraft. Egyptian forces pushed northwards towards Tel Aviv, one column via the Gaza Strip and the other via Beersheba, and came close to conquering Tel Aviv, before being pushed back by the Israeli Defence Force, which managed to recapture Beer Sheba and the whole Negev desert. With the Israeli victory and the truce agreements of February 1949, Abu Sitta's family remained initially in Gaza. Abu Sitta then moved to the prestigious al-Saidiya secondary school in Cairo, Egypt, where he graduated with "excellence", ranking first in Egypt.. After graduating from Cairo University's Faculty of Engineering in 1958, Abu Sitta went to the United Kingdom to continue his post-graduate studies, receiving his PhD in Civil Engineering from one of the well-known colleges of the University of London, UCL. After graduating from Cairo University's Faculty of Engineering in 1958, Abu Sitta went to the United Kingdom to continue his post-graduate studies, receiving his PhD in Civil Engineering from one of the well known colleges of the University of London, UCL. He then returned to ???? and his key activities include:
Abu Sitta has engaged in debates with Israelis who profess interest in peace without the return of the refugees, including Uri Avnery and Rabbi Michael Lerner. Documentation of the 1948 Palestinian exodus Abu Sitta has spent 40 years digging for any detail of information about or related to Palestine before, during and after al Nakba. Abu Sitta's work has encompassed not only documenting the Nakba in which an estimated 6-800,000 Palestinians were displaced,, but also ensuring that "the memories and identity of the occupied homeland are never lost". He is regarded by Uri Avnery as perhaps 'the world's foremost expert on the Nakba'. The documentation process began when he was 30 years old, when he stumbled on the memoirs of the Turkish chief of Beersheba, when Palestine was under Ottoman rule. The document dated back to the early years of the twentieth century. "It sort of started from there, and it has never stopped," Abu Sitta says. "I kept collecting all and any material on every inch of my homeland." Abu Sitta's work was to show that the return of the refugees to their homes is not only sacred to Palestinians, legal under international law but also feasible and possible without major dislocation to the existing Jewish settlers in Palestine. His work also includes the compendium "Atlas of Palestine 1917- 1966",.
