From Gaza to Kyiv, a Palestinian doctor lives between two wars

Alya Gali, a Gaza Strip-born doctor, shares memories amid debris in Kyiv, Ukraine, Monday, July 22, 2024 two weeks after a missile killed nine as it hit a private clinic where he has worked for most of his professional life.(AP)
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Updated 01 August 2024
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From Gaza to Kyiv, a Palestinian doctor lives between two wars

  • 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
  • Both are violent conflicts that have upset regional and global power balances, but they can seem worlds apart as they rage on

KYIV: 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 kilometers 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 siblings in Gaza’s southernmost city, Rafah. But mostly, their lives played out in parallel.
In February 2022, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine threw Gali’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 support. In each place, rampant bombardment and heavy fighting have killedtens of thousands and wiped out 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. Colleagues 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 heart 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 family’s youngest child — the last grape 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 becoming a doctor — specializing in fertility, after seeing relatives struggle to conceive.
In 1987, the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, erupted in Gaza and the West Bank. Gali joined the youth arm of the Fatah Movement, 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 leave.
There was good news: an opportunity to study medicine in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Gali bade tearful goodbyes to his family, not knowing if he’d see them again.
He traveled 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, just after the Soviet Union’s collapse.
It was like leaving one bedlam for another, he said: “The country was in a state of chaos, with no law and very difficult living conditions.”
Many peers left. Gali stayed, enrolling in medical school.
New life, new name
In the Ukrainian language, there’s no equivalent for Arabic’s notoriously difficult glottal 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 most Ukrainians who’d lived under the Soviet Union — 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 landed 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 anti-government protests set the stage for Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014. There was a war in Gaza that year, too, he remembers.
Gali mouths the lyrics as Ukrainian street signs whiz by: “You keep crushing us, oh world.”
Wars collide
On July 8, Gali was at work, but his mind was on Gaza.
A week earlier, 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 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’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 the 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, triggering an explosion that obliterated the third and fourth floors.
Gali worked on the fourth. In the dense cloud 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 rescuers. Amid bodies on the floor, he found a colleague, Viktor Bragutsa, bleeding profusely. Gali couldn’t resuscitate him.
A room holding patients’ documents had been reduced to debris, their 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 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, 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 reception 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 Gaza, he knows, there’s no safe place for his family to evacuate.
Communicating isn’t easy, with telecommunications blackouts. Weeks go by without word, until a nephew or niece finds enough signal to tell him they’re alive.
“No matter how 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.”


Sudan files AU complaint against Chad over arms: minister

Updated 4 sec ago
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Sudan files AU complaint against Chad over arms: minister

PORT SUDAN: Sudan’s army-backed government on Tuesday accused neighboring Chad of supplying arms to rebel militias, likely referring to the paramilitary forces it is battling.
The northeast African country has been engulfed by war since April 2023, when fighting broke out between the regular army, led by de facto ruler Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) commanded by his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo.
Justice minister Muawiya Osman said Burhan’s administration had lodged the complaint against Chad at the African Union.
Speaking to reporters, including AFP, Osman said the government demanded compensation and accused Chad of “supplying arms to rebel militias” and causing “harm to Sudanese citizens.”
“We will present evidence to the relevant authorities,” he added from Port Sudan, where Burhan relocated after fighting spread to the capital, Khartoum.
Chad last month denied accusations that it was “amplifying the war in Sudan” by arming the RSF.
“We do not support any of the factions that are fighting on Sudanese territory — we are in favor of peace,” foreign minister and government spokesman Abderaman Koulamallah said at the time.
The United Nations has been using the Adre border crossing between the two countries to deliver humanitarian aid.
Sudan had initially agreed to keep the crossing open for three months, a period set to expire on November 15. Authorities in Khartoum have yet to decide whether to extend the arrangement.
The Sudanese war has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced more than 11 million, including 3.1 million who are now sheltering beyond the country’s borders.

Explosion at Turkish oil refinery injures 12

Updated 17 min 22 sec ago
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Explosion at Turkish oil refinery injures 12

  • The 12 employees sustained slight injuries and were taken to a hospital for examinations

ANKARA: An explosion at an oil refinery in northwestern Turkiye on Tuesday left at least 12 employees slightly injured, the company said. A fire at the facility was quickly brought under control.
The Turkish Petroleum Refineries company, TUPRAS, said a fire broke out at its facilities in Izmit, in Kocaeli province, during maintenance work on a compressor. The company’s emergency teams responded immediately to the incident, it said in a statement.
The 12 employees sustained slight injuries and were taken to a hospital for examinations, the company said.
The company said the unit where the incident occurred “was deactivated in a controlled manner” and that other operations at the refinery were “continuing as normal.”
Earlier, Tahir Buyukakin, the mayor for Kocaeli told private NTV television that the blast occurred during a drill. The fire was quickly brought under control by the company’s own crews and no request for help was made, he said.
Video footage from the site showed smoke rising from the refinery, which is one of Turkiye’s largest. Izmit is about 100 kilometers (62 miles) east of Istanbul.
The Borsa Istanbul stock exchange temporarily halted trading of TUPRAS shares, until the company provides a detailed explanation of the incident.


Israeli strikes hit south of Beirut and Lebanon’s Bekaa region

Updated 30 min 33 sec ago
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Israeli strikes hit south of Beirut and Lebanon’s Bekaa region

BEIRUT: At least one Israeli airstrike hit an apartment building in a beach town south of Beirut on Tuesday, Lebanese state media said, as other deadly strikes hit scattered locations across the country and armed group Hezbollah launched rockets into Israel.
The attack on the beach town of Jiyyeh left a massive smoke column billowing out of an apartment building. It was not immediately clear if the strike was an assassination attempt, and no evacuation warning was given before it was carried out.
The Israeli military and Iran-backed Hezbollah have been exchanging fire for over a year in parallel with the Gaza war, but hostilities have escalated over the last six weeks. More than 3,000 people have been killed in Lebanon, most of them since late September, according to health authorities.
Israeli strikes on Tuesday also killed five people near the city of Baalbek in the Bekaa Valley, including two killed in a strike on a car, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.
Lebanon’s state news agency said on Tuesday that it estimated Israeli air strikes and widespread detonation of homes had destroyed more than 40,000 housing units in the country’s border region.


Iran says killed eight militants since attack on police in province bordering Pakistan

Updated 05 November 2024
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Iran says killed eight militants since attack on police in province bordering Pakistan

  • Militants from the Jaish Al-Adl group killed 10 police officers during a raid in Sistan-Baluchistan province on October 26
  • Sistan-Baluchistan, which straddles border with Afghanistan and Pakistan, is one of Iran’s most impoverished provinces

TEHRAN: Iran’s military has killed eight militants in an operation in the restive southeast since a deadly attack last month on a police station, state media reported Tuesday.
Militants from the Pakistan-based Jaish Al-Adl group killed 10 police officers during a raid on October 26 in Sistan-Baluchistan province — one of the deadliest attacks in the region in recent months.
Sistan-Baluchistan, which straddles the border with Afghanistan and Pakistan, is one of Iran’s most impoverished provinces.
It has long been a flashpoint for cross-border attacks by separatists and extremists, opposed to the authorities in Iran.
Revolutionary Guards commander Ahmad Shafahi said “a total of eight terrorists have been killed” since the beginning of operations in the province, according to the official IRNA news agency on Tuesday.
“Fourteen other terrorists have been arrested,” including key figures involved in the attack, he said, adding security forces seized weapons and ammunition.
Shortly after the attack in Taftan county, some 1,200 kilometers (745 miles) southeast of the capital Tehran, a report on the Tasnim news agency said four militants had been killed and four others arrested.
Late on Monday, IRNA quoted Guards ground forces commander Mohammad Pakpour as saying the attackers “were not Iranian,” though he did not specify their nationalities.
In early October, at least six people including police officers were killed in two separate attacks in the province.
Jaish Al-Adl said on Telegram they had carried out the attacks.
Formed in 2012 by Baluch separatists, the group is proscribed as a “terrorist organization” by both Iran and the United States.
 
 


Over 100 patients to be evacuated from Gaza, WHO says

Updated 05 November 2024
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Over 100 patients to be evacuated from Gaza, WHO says

  • The patients will travel in a large convoy on Wednesday via the Kerem Shalom crossing

GENEVA: More than 100 patients including children suffering from trauma injuries and chronic diseases will be evacuated from Gaza on Wednesday in a rare transfer out of the war-ravaged enclave, a World Health Organization official said.
“These are ad hoc measures. What we have requested repeatedly is a sustained medevac (medical evacuation) outside of Gaza,” said Rik Peeperkorn, WHO representative for the Occupied Palestinian Territory, adding that 12,000 people were awaiting transfer.
The patients will travel in a large convoy on Wednesday via the Kerem Shalom crossing with Israel before flying to the United Arab Emirates, he added, and then a portion will travel to Romania.