Doctor Alaa Shabaan Abu Ghali’s experiences reflect the intersecting impacts of war, as he deals with the devastation in Kiev while his family endures the conflict in Gaza.
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 besieged Gaza, he is Alaa Shabaan Abu Ghali, the one who left.
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. When Gali was 9, his father died. Money was tight, but Gali excelled in school and dreamed of becoming a doctor — specialising in fertility, after seeing relatives struggle to conceive.
In the Ukrainian language, there's no equivalent for Arabic's notoriously difficult glottal consonants. So in Kiev, Alaa became Alya. He assumed a patronymic middle name, adding the usual suffix to his father’s name — Shabaanovich. 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.
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