In war-torn Ukraine, he is Alya Shabaanovich Gali, a popular doctor with a line of pati🍃ents waiting to see him. To his family thousands of kilometres away in the besieged Gaza Strip, he is Alaa Shabaan Abu Ghali, the one who left.
For the past 30 years, these identities rarely had cause to merge: Gali moved away amid instability in Gaza, settled into his new home in Kyiv, adopted a different name to better suit the local tongue, and married a Ukranian woman. Through calls, he kept up with his mother and siblin൲gs in Gaza's southernmost city, Rafah. But mostly, their lives played out in parallel.
In February 2022, Russia's invasion of Ukraine threw Ga💞li's life into chaos, with air raids and missile attacks. Nearly 20 months later, the war between Israel and Hamas turned his🤡 hometown into a hellscape, uprooting his family.
Both are violent conflicts that have upset regional and global power balances, but they can seem worlds apart as they rage on. Ukraine has lambasted allies for coming to Israel's defense while its own troops languished on the frontlines. Palestinians have decried double standards in international s💦upport. In each place, rampant bombardment and heavy fighting have killed tens of thousands and wiped ou💛t entire towns.
In Gali's life, the wars converge. A month ago, his nephew was killed in an Israeli strike while foraging for food. Weeks later, a🧸 Russian missile tore through the private clinic where he's worked for most of his professional life. Colleag💞ues and patients died at his feet.
“I was in a war there, and now I am in a war here,” said Gali, 48, standing inside the hollowed-out wing of the medical center as workers swept away glass and debris. “Half of my ൩heart and ⭕mind are here, and the other half is there.
“You witness the war and destruction with your family in Palestine, and see the war and destruction with ꦺyour own eyes, here in Ukraine.”
Gaza To Kyiv
There's an Arabic saying to describe a famil♏y's youngest child — the last grap🐷e in the bunch. Gali's mother would say the last is the sweetest; the youngest of 10, he was her favorite.
When Gali was 9, his father died. Money was tight, but Gali excelled in school and dreamed of becomingꦰ a doctor — specializing in fertility, after seeing relatives struggle to𒈔 conceive.
In 1987, the first Pale🌌stinian intifada, or uprising, erupted in Gaza and the West Bank. Gali joined the youth arm of the Fatah Movemen𝕴t, a party espousing a nationalist ideology, long before the Islamist Hamas group would take root. One by one, friends were arrested and interrogated; some went to prison, others took up arms.
🍸Gali had a choice: Stay and risk the same fate, or lꦯeave.
There was good news: an opportunity to study medicine in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Gali bade tearful goodb🏅yes to his family, not knowing if he'd see them again.
He traꦍveled to Moscow, expecting to catch a train. Instead, he learned Almaty was no longer an option. But there was a spot in Kyiv.
And so a young Gali arrived in Ukraine in 1992, jus෴t after the Soviet Union's collapse.
It was like leaving one bedlam f🤪or another, he said: “The country was in a state of chaos, with no law and very difficult living conditions."
Many♓ peers left. Gali st🅷ayed, enrolling in medical school.
New Life, New Name
In the Ukrainian language, there's no equivalent for Arabic's notoriously difficult glottꦿal consonants. So in Kyiv, Alaa became Alya. He assumed a patronymic middle name, adding the usual suffix to his father's name — Shabaanovich.
While learning Russian — spoken by mꦯost Ukrainians who'd lived under the Soviet Unio💧n — Gali struggled with errands. Neighbors helped. Through them, he met his wife. They would have three children.
He finished medical school, becoming a gynecologist specializing in fertility. His career's early days were long,🔴 seeing dozens of patients. Eventually, he l๊anded at a practice at the Adonis medical center, where he thrived.
When Gali drives to work, listening to songs in Arabic, he passes Kyiv's Maidan, a square where antiꦅ-government protests set the stage for Russia's seizur൩e of Crimea in 2014. There was a war in Gaza that year, too, he remembers.
Gali mouthꦚs the lyrics as Ukrainian street signs whiz by: "Yཧou keep crushing us, oh world.”
Wars Collide
On July 8, Gali was at ෴work, buꦛt his mind was on Gaza.
A weไek earli𝓰er, a relative reached out — Gali's 12-year old niece had been killed as Israeli tanks advanced to the edge of the Mawasi camp for displaced Palestinians, northwest of Rafah. Like tens of thousands of Gazans, his family had fled there on foot after Israel designated it a humanitarian zone.
Gali had already been mourning. A nephew, Fathi, was killed the previous month. Gali saw it himself, he said, on television — his nephew's lifeless body on the screen, headlines flas꧋hing in Arabic. He described the image and Fathi's clothes to a relative, who confirmed it was him.
Their deaths weighed heavily on Gali. For nine months, he'd lived in fear for his family, of a text message saying they'd🐽 all been killed.
In the medical center that day, air raids rang out all morning. Before greeting his next patient, he shared a few words with th🌳e center director. She'd just driven by Okhmadyt Children's Hospital, struck hours earlier by a missile — a terrible sight, Ukraine's largest pediatric facility in ruins, she told him. He told her about the deaths of his niece and nephew, the darkness of his grief.
Not long after, Gali's world went even darker.
A Russian missile came hurtling toward the center, triggeri💯ng an explosion tꦰhat obliterated the third and fourth floors.
Gali worked on the fourth. In the dense clouꦬd of debris, he sought out shadowy figures covered in blood. He saw a patient and, using his phone for light, pulled her out from under the collapsed roof, as colleagues and others died around him — nine killed in all.
He led the woman to his office to wait for rescuerไs. Amid bodies on the floor, he found a colleague, Viktor Bragutsa, bleeding profusely. Gali couldn't resuscitate him.
A room holding patients' documents had beღen reduced to debris, thei꧅r records spanning decades up in smoke.
He felt pangs of deja vu.
For months, he'd seen images of Gaza's war. It was as if they'd somehow bled into his lifeꩵ in Ukraine.
“Nothing is sacred," he said. "Killing doctors, killing chജildren, killing civilians — this is the picture we💞 are faced with.”
Only Pain
Two weeks later, Gali stood in the same spot, gazing at bombed-out walls as workers sifted through rubble. “What ꧂can I feel?" he said "Pain. Nothing else.”
The center director's office is destroyed. So is the rec🐼eption area. Ultrasound machines and operating tables lay haphazardly.
He had stayed in Ukraine, didn't evacuate his family — he took comfort in his office🐷, in helping patients. And still, he said, he'll stay.
In Ga🍌za,♛ he knows, there's no safe place for his family to evacuate.
Communicating isn't easy, with telecommunications blacko൲uts. Weeks go by without word, until a nephew or niece finds enough signal to tell him they're alive.
“No matter howꩲ difficult and impossible the situation is," he said, "their words are always filled with laughter, patience and gratitude to God.
“I am here, feeling the weight.”
