“If I have to die, let it be at least in my country. ” Like Tetiana Kocheva, Ukrainians who sought refuge in Israel after the Russian invasion have to return to their country, despite the war, to flee the conflict. with Hamas.
When Russian troops invaded Ukraine in late February 2022, Tetiana, 39, and her three children, now aged 14, 10 and 3, were living in the northeastern city of Kharkiv, near the border with Russia.
Kharkiv is one of the first targets of Russian shelling in Ukraine. Tetiana and her children hid in a basement for ten days.
In July 2022, they left Ukraine for Israel, where her husband worked. “I thought we would stay 3 months and then come back,” “but the war is over. “The circle of relatives settled in Ashkelon, a city in southern Israel. near Gaza.
On October 7, the day of the bloody attack by the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas into Israeli territory from Gaza, “my hands began to shake and I had the same feeling as when the war began in my country,” he said. saying. Tétiane.
He describes the “incessant” sound of sirens, “explosions that don’t stop,” nights in shelters with children.
“When [the conflict] escalated . . . I panicked, I got scared, and I knew I had to go home,” the woman said. The family members were evacuated to central Israel, where they stayed for a few days, before returning to Ukraine. where they arrived on October 20. He returned to Kharkiv.
This city is the target of Russian shelling, but for just under a year it has not been threatened with occupation.
Since Oct. 7, some 4,000 Ukrainians have fled Israel, according to Ukrainian embassy figures. “It’s my homeland, my flag, I don’t know how to express it, I’m happy” to be back, Tetiana said. “I have to die, at least that’s how it will be in my country,” he adds resignedly.
About 400 kilometers away in the capital Kyiv, eight-year-old Diana dances on dry leaves in a park on the banks of the Dnieper River. The woman and her mother, 28-year-old Anna Lyashko, returned from Israel in mid-October. They fled Ukraine in March 2022.
At the time, they were living in a Russian-occupied city near Kyiv, “where they were under shelling, no electricity, no water, no communications,” Anna says.
“My daughter was very scared and we left” to Israel, where one of her cousins lived. The woman thought they would stay “a year or two. “But on October 7, “war broke out there, too. “”The emotions were the same as on February 24 in Ukraine . . . I looked at my daughter and saw the concern in her eyes. “
“I learned we couldn’t stay there. ” She and her daughter left Tel Aviv on October 14 with the help of the Ukrainian embassy.
From the centre of Kyiv, Oksana Sokolovska, 39, also said she was “happy to have returned home”, although “it is difficult to leave one war for another”.
She left Ukraine with her three children on March 16, 2022. She chose Israel because “she thought it was the safest country in the world. ” The family settled in Rishon Le Tzion, near Tel Aviv.
When the Hamas attack began, “the air raid sirens sounded, the shelling began” and “we stayed all day in the bomb shelter with the children,” he said.
He temporarily left Israel “so as not to endanger the lives of my children,” and on October 14 they boarded a plane. “At the moment, the scenario is calmer in Kyiv and its region than in Israel. . . That’s the only explanation for why I came back here,” he admits.