‘My other homeland needs me more’

The war in Gaza through the eyes of a Russian-Palestinian family

At the start of the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas, more than 1,200 Russians were estimated to be living in the Gaza Strip. These included international aid workers, spouses who married into Palestinian families, and the children of these couples who had dual Russian-Palestinian citizenship. The independent journalists’ cooperative Bereg recently told the story of a Russian-Palestinian family who managed to evacuate from Gaza in mid-November, including Khaled Zorob, a resident physician at Kazan State Medical Academy in Russia; his mother, Olga; his wife, Kristina; and his younger brother, Iosef. Khaled’s father, an ENT specialist named Ayad, chose to remain in Gaza to continue treating patients. Meduza in English shares a summary of the family’s experience.

On October 7, Khaled Zorob got up at 5:00 a.m. for his morning prayer. He was in Khan Yunis, Gaza’s second-largest city, just a few miles from the Egyptian border, and it was quiet. After praying, he went back to sleep, only to be awoken again at 7:00 a.m. by the sound of missile strikes. “We couldn’t believe it — we didn’t know what was happening. We stayed home and followed the news,” he recalls. “After 2:00 p.m., drones started flying in from the direction of the Jews. We heard their planes and the sounds of missiles landing. That’s how it began.”

Khaled’s mother, Olga Kuznetsova, is originally from Russia, while his father, Ayad Ataya Abdelkhamid Zorob, is Palestinian. The two met in the early 1990s in the Russian city of Cheboksary, where they were both medical students at Chuvash State University. In 1999, when Khaled was one year old, the family moved to the Gaza Strip, where Ayad had grown up. “My husband wanted to live in the place where he was born, where his relatives were,” Olga said.

Getting used to life in Gaza was difficult for Olga, who was born and raised in Russia. “It’s a completely different environment from both Europe and Russia,” she told Bereg. “A totally different climate — just sand and desert. There’s not the same kind of civilization you have in other countries. The lifestyle and customs were alien [to me].”

But over time, she said, this began to change, thanks to the support of her husband and his family. Khaled’s younger brothers, Omar and Iosef, were born in Gaza.

Several years after moving, Olga began working as an OB-GYN at a hospital in southern Gaza. Her colleagues there included a gynecologist from Ukraine and a nurse from Kazakhstan. While none of them were fluent in Arabic, Olga had learned enough to converse with her patients. “We had a good team at the hospital,” she said. “Everyone loved and supported all of us Russians.”

Khaled, who grew up in Khan Yunis, is a dual citizen of Russia and Palestine. After finishing high school, he returned to Russia, where he enrolled in the same medical program in Cheboksary where his parents had met. Following graduation, he became a resident urologist at Kazan State Medical Academy, where he met his future wife, Kristina, a resident gastroenterologist there.

In early October 2023, Khaled and Kristina went on vacation to the Gaza Strip to visit Khaled’s parents. It had been seven years since Khaled had set foot in Palestine. “We had so much hope and so many plans,” Olga recalled. “Our children had come to visit. We wanted so badly to give them a good impression of Gaza.”

‘No district left unbombed’

Khaled and Kristina arrived in Khan Yunis on October 3. On the morning of October 7, the Zorob family learned that Hamas terrorists had attacked civilians in Israel, killing an estimated 1,200 Israelis and taking at least 240 prisoners. “We started hearing from the news that Palestinians had entered Israeli territory,” Olga said. “We were afraid, of course — very afraid. We knew it wouldn’t be over anytime soon, and that they had taken hostages. Then it all started: the bombings, and the cutting off of our phone service, Internet, and electricity.”

Olga Zorob declined to answer Bereg’s questions about Hamas. Khaled, for his part, said he “doesn’t know the details” of the October 7 attack but that “the Jews themselves killed civilians” on that day, citing eyewitness accounts from attendees of the Israeli music festival that came under attack. (The Israeli news outlet Haaretz reported that an Israeli Defense Forces helicopter may have struck unarmed festivalgoers while firing at Hamas fighters.)

Khaled had the following to say about the attack:

They say, for example, that Hamas killed Jewish children, right? I’m sorry, but are there photographs? We don’t accept hearsay as evidence. To this day, not a single photo has been shown, because this didn’t happen. (Note from Bereg: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has posted photos online that he said showed Israeli babies killed by Hamas.) I’ll tell you straight out, someone lied. Hamas soldiers didn’t kill Jewish children.

According to the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which relies on official data provided by the Israeli authorities, 33 children were killed by the Hamas attack and 40 children were taken captive by Hamas.

In late October, in response to Hamas’s attack, Israel launched a ground offensive in the Gaza Strip with the goal of completely eliminating Hamas. According to the Gaza Health Ministry, more than 20,000 people have been killed in Gaza since October 7, a figure the U.N. has said is reliable. At the same time, Gazan officials have acknowledged that as the scale of the destruction worsens, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to keep an accurate account of the death toll. The majority of those killed (about 70 percent), according to the local health ministry, are women and children.

As soon as the war broke out, Khaled and his family filled their cars with gas and purchased 500 liters (132 gallons) of drinking water, which cost the equivalent of more than $300. Since then, the price of water in Gaza has only gone up, according to official data.

Israeli missile strikes have destroyed tens of thousands of residential buildings in the Gaza Strip, including in the southern regions that the Israeli military ordered Gaza City residents to evacuate to in advance of bombing campaigns. Journalists from The New York Times who visited the Gaza Strip reported that Israeli soldiers who accompanied them said the large-scale death and destruction there was the “unavoidable cost of fighting an urban battle” against an enemy willing to embed itself within civilian infrastructure. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said during a meeting with soldiers that Israel is fighting against “human animals” and that Gaza “won’t return to what it was before.”

“There’s no district in the Gaza Strip that hasn’t been bombed,” said Khaled Zorob. “They bombed the building next to the one where my grandfather lived.” He estimated that in the area of Khan Yunis where his family lives, seven to ten multi-story residential buildings were bombed, each housing at least 50 people. (Bereg was unable to independently verify these numbers.)

‘Why were these children killed?’

In late October, a Gaza resident from Kazakhstan named Yulia Abu-Mealak was killed along with her 23-year-old daughter when an Israeli missile hit their home in Deir al Balah. According to Olga Zorob, Yulia’s body was found immediately, while her daughter wasn’t found for a week (Bereg was unable to confirm this information from open sources).

Yulia’s death made a strong impression on Olga. “Who knows if her daughter died immediately or if she was lying there alone under the rubble for a week. It’s scary for me to think about,” she said. “Honestly, because of that, I prayed to God to let us be killed immediately and all together if we’re bombed. So that none of us suffer.”

Olga said that 41 people from her family have been killed since the start of the war, including 25 children. Due to a lack of equipment, some of the dead are still trapped beneath the ruins. “We pulled bodies out piece by piece, burying the remains in bags, including those of children,” she recalled. “Some of them were just a few months old. Why were these children killed? For what purpose?”

Khaled said he knows the answer. “This is the Jews’ approach: kill Palestinian children so that they don’t grow up to fight against Jews,” he said.

In mid-November, an employee from the U.N.’s Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) said that people in Khan Yunis are sleeping outside and that children are “standing in queues for over six hours just to get a piece of bread or a bottle of water.” According to UNRWA data, more than 880,000 Palestinians are now living in 154 U.N.-equipped shelters such as former school buildings and warehouses.

The Nasser Hospital, where Olga Zorob worked in Khan Yunis, is one of the few remaining medical facilities in the Gaza Strip and the only place in Khan Yunis that still has water. Doctors there have been working under fire. “Our hospital was covering practically the entire population of the Gaza Strip,” Olga said. “More than a million people relocated [to Khan Yunis].”

According to Olga, refugees settled throughout the area around the hospital, leaving only a small area for ambulances to pass through. “It was impossible to enter the [hospital] territory without tears,” she said. “It was a nightmare.”

The only parts of the hospitals where refugees were barred from entering, Olga said, were the operating rooms, where the doctors needed water to wash their hands before surgeries. “People came to the maternity ward for drinking water. How can you refuse them?” she said.

After the start of the war, many doctors in the Gaza Strip moved to the hospital complex after their homes were destroyed. They spend nights in their cars or sleep on rugs outside the building. Olga started working 24-hour shifts every other day, and she stopped receiving a salary altogether.

Olga recounted what it was like to delivery babies in a war zone:

There was one case that really stuck in my memory. They transported a woman to us who was eight months pregnant and whose home had just been bombed. We amputated one of her legs and one of her arms — and immediately we had to delivery the baby [by C-section]. Can you imagine? Naturally, we couldn’t discharge her after that.

Later, Olga Zorob delivered the baby of an unconscious woman who was brought to the hospital after being injured in an overnight shelling attack. “We did a C-section right in the reception area,” she said. “We thought we were operating on a dead person. The baby survived. His mother was practically a corpse — we’d already done a post mortem! But afterwards, in the ICU, she recovered.”

Olga’s husband Ayad, an ENT specialist, works in a different hospital. Before the war, his family said, he usually managed to see about 25 patients in a single shift. Now, he’s treating up to 120 people a day, according to Olga. “In wartime, doctors don’t have specific fields: everyone does everything,” she said.

‘I have two homelands’

According to Olga, Russia was the first country to submit its list of people to be evacuated (Bereg was unable to confirm this), but citizens of Egypt, the U.S., Great Britain, and other European countries were evacuated first, despite Russia’s relatively warm relations with Hamas. “The Ukrainian list [also] came before us. But that doesn’t depend on Russia, of course — it’s all politics,” Olga said.

Olga, her son Khaled and his wife Kristina, and Olga’s youngest son Iosef were finally able to leave Gaza on November 12. Olga’s husband, Khaled, accompanied his family to the border but decided to stay behind. “My father is also a Russian citizen, and he was on the evacuation list,” Khaled said. “But he told me, ‘I’m not going, because I’m a doctor.’” According to Khaled, the Gazan authorities didn’t pressure doctors not to evacuate: “Each person decided for themselves,” he said.

Olga tried to convince Ayad to come with her and the children, but he refused. “He told me, ‘I can’t, this is my country. Put yourself in my shoes: if this was happening in Russia, would you, as a doctor, be able to leave?’” she said.

The members of the Zorob family who evacuated are now in Cheboksary, where Olga grew up. Olga hopes to find a job there, but first she’ll have to take special courses and pass a three-stage test to prove her medical qualifications. “Muslims in [Russia’s Republic of] Chuvashia are supporting us: they’re raising money for my youngest, who will have to go to school for the next year and a half in a private Arabic-language school in Moscow. His Russian isn’t good enough [for him to graduate from a public school],” Olga said. “The Chuvashia government has provided humanitarian aid such as clothing, bedding, and groceries. I’m very grateful to everyone.”

Olga wants to stay in Russia. She hopes that when the war in Gaza is over, Ayad will join her.

Khaled, on the other hand, is thinking of returning to Gaza. He said his family was lucky to get out of the war zone, but he’s concerned about everyone who’s still there.

I don’t know how long I’ll be in Russia. I have two homelands, but that one [Palestine] needs me more. What I want is to return. The Gaza Strip has been destroyed, and who’s going to rebuild it? If we don’t take responsibility for our homeland, who will? Who wants us Palestinians? Nobody. If we don’t raise our country up, nobody will, and that’s the end of it. I’m here, but my mind is there.

Reporting by Yulia Starostina for Bereg

Abridged English-language version by Sam Breazeale