“We thought our love was hopeless, but we continued nonetheless,” Fadi al-Ghazali told Al-Monitor, standing in his heavily damaged apartment in the Sheikh Radwan district of Gaza City. As he and his mother went about clearing the rubble in their apartment from the Nov. 12 Israeli airstrike, on the wall hung a wedding gown, an object that has dominated social media as the symbol of the touching love story of Fadi and Yara, a young woman from Syria.

Fadi had met Yara al-Zoubi on Facebook five years ago, just like many other youngsters of their generation. What set their relationship apart from the millions of other keyboard romances, however, was that they had very little hope of ever meeting in person. One was living under an Israeli blockade that made traveling nearly impossible, and the other spent her life moving from city to city to escape the fighting in Syria's civil war. Yara is originally from Khan Sheikhoun, the city in northwestern Syrian that made headlines in April 2017 as the site of a poison gas attack that killed at least 86 people. 

“Our common experience and the harsh circumstances we lived under brought us together,” Fadi said. “I knew she was my soulmate.” They fell in love three years ago and got engaged online.

“A lot of people called our love story hopeless and delusional, because of the blockade on Gaza and the war in Syria, but we persevered, and we believed that our love is worth all the challenges,” Fadi said, noting that several attempts to get Yara to Gaza had failed. “Over the past three years, we moved heaven and earth to get Yara here.”