From Gaza to Kiev, a Palestinian doctor lives between wars – Winnipeg Free Press

KIEV, Ukraine (AP) — In war-torn Ukraine, he is Alya Shabaanovich Gali, a popular doctor with a line of patients waiting to see him. To his family, thousands of miles away in the besieged Gaza Strip, he is Alaa Shabaan Abu Ghali, the one who left.

Over the past 30 years, these identities have rarely had occasion to merge: Gali moved away amid Gaza’s instability, settled in his new home in Kiev, adopted a new name to better fit the local language, and married a Ukrainian woman. He kept in touch with his mother and siblings in Gaza’s southernmost city, Rafah, through phone calls. But mostly, their lives have played out in parallel.

In February 2022, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine threw Gali’s life into chaos, with airstrikes and rocket attacks. Nearly 20 months later, the war between Israel and Hamas turned his hometown into a living hell, uprooting his family.

Both are violent conflicts that have upset regional and global power balances, but they can be worlds apart when they rage. Ukraine has criticized allies for coming to Israel’s aid while its own troops languish on the front lines. Palestinians have criticized double standards in international aid. In both places, rampant bombing and heavy fighting have killed tens of thousands of people and wiped out entire cities.

In Gali’s life, wars collide. A month ago, his cousin was killed in an Israeli attack while he was searching for food. Weeks later, a Russian missile ripped through the private clinic where he has worked for most of his professional life. Colleagues and patients died at his feet.

“I was in a war there, and now I’m in a war here,” said Gali, 48, standing in the gutted wing of the medical center as workers swept away glass and debris. “Half of my heart and mind is here, and the other half is there.

“You witness the war and the destruction with your family in Palestine, and you see the war and the destruction with your own eyes, here in Ukraine.”

Gaza to Kiev

There is an Arabic saying to describe the youngest child in a family: the last grape in the bunch. Gali’s mother would say that the last one 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 becoming a doctor — specializing in fertility, after watching family members struggle to conceive.

In 1987, the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, broke out in Gaza and the West Bank. Gali joined the youth wing of the Fatah movement, a party that espoused a nationalist ideology, long before the Islamist Hamas group took 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 leave.

There was good news: a chance to study medicine in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Gali said goodbye to his family with tears in his eyes, not knowing if he would ever see them again.

He traveled to Moscow, expecting to catch a train. Instead, he heard that Almaty was no longer an option. But there was a place in Kiev.

And so in 1992, shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, a young Gali arrived in Ukraine.

It was like leaving one chaos for another, he said: “The country was in chaos, with no laws and very difficult living conditions.”

Many colleagues left. Gali stayed and enrolled in medical school.

New life, new name

In the Ukrainian language there is no equivalent for the notoriously difficult glottal consonants of Arabic. So in Kiev Alaa became Alya. He adopted a patronymic as a middle name, adding the usual suffix to his father’s name: Shabaanovich.

While learning Russian — spoken by most Ukrainians living under the Soviet Union — Gali struggled with groceries. Neighbors helped. Through them, he met his wife. They would have three children.

He completed his medical training and became a gynecologist, specializing in fertility. The early days of his career were long, seeing dozens of patients. He eventually found a practice at the Adonis Medical Center, where he flourished.

As Gali drives to work, listening to Arabic songs, he passes Maidan Square in Kiev, a square where anti-government protests led to Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014. He also remembers a war in Gaza that year.

Gali sings along to the lyrics as Ukrainian street signs flash by: “You keep crushing us, oh world.”

Wars collide

On July 8, Gali was at work, but his thoughts were on Gaza.

A week earlier, a relative got in touch — Gali’s 12-year-old niece had been killed when Israeli tanks advanced on 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 declared it a humanitarian zone.

Gali was already in mourning. A cousin, Fathi, had been murdered the previous month. Gali saw it himself, he said, on television — his cousin’s lifeless body on the screen, headlines flashing 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 had lived in fear of his family, of a text message saying they had all been killed.

Air raids rang out all morning that day at the medical center. Before greeting his next patient, he exchanged a few words with the center’s director. She had just driven past the Okhmadyt Children’s Hospital, which had been hit by a rocket hours earlier—a terrible sight, the largest children’s hospital in Ukraine 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 life became even darker.

A Russian missile flew towards the center, causing an explosion that destroyed the third and fourth floors.

Gali was working on the fourth. In the dense cloud of rubble, he searched for shadowy figures covered in blood. He spotted a patient and, using his phone as a light, pulled her out from under the collapsed roof as colleagues and others around him died — nine dead in all.

He led the woman to his office to wait for rescuers. Among the bodies on the floor he found a colleague, Viktor Bragutsa, bleeding profusely. Gali was unable to revive him.

A room full of patient documents had been reduced to rubble, their records spanning decades gone up in smoke.

He felt a sense of déjà vu.

For months he had seen images of the war in Gaza, as if they had somehow penetrated his life in Ukraine.

“Nothing is sacred,” he said. “Killing doctors, killing children, killing civilians — this is the picture we are faced with.”

Only pain

Two weeks later, Gali stood in the same spot, staring at bombed-out walls as workers sifted through the rubble. “What can I feel?” he said. “Pain. Nothing else.”

The office of the director of the center is destroyed. And also the reception. Ultrasound machines and operating tables are lying haphazardly.