Out of the frying pan and into the fire: Ukrainian nationals trapped in Gaza need help 

Ukrainians who fled to Gaza are getting no help escaping Israel’s bombing campaign. A 21-year-old with leukemia would do anything to get back to Ukraine.  

The bombing of Gaza was already in its second week when Khaled El-Hissy went to the Turkish Palestinian Friendship Hospital. He’d felt sick for days, with 104 degree fever, body aches and weakness. Thinking it was a reaction to stress and malnutrition, his mother, Oksana, decided it would be unethical to take him to the larger, better equipped Shifa Hospital, which was overwhelmed with casualties from the bombardment. Surely Khaled just needed IV fluids and nutritious food. 

Oksana, a Ukrainian citizen living in Gaza, was right that her son’s condition was triggered by the trauma of the war. But it wasn’t just stress and malnutrition — Khaled was diagnosed with leukemia. His platelets were abnormally low and the cancer had spread to 60 percent of his blood. To survive, he needs chemotherapy immediately.  

“I had hopes and dreams and the war came,” Khaled texted a friend in the United States. “I said okay, war is something I am used to. But now I am lost with this cancer.”  

The hospital where he’s sheltering cannot treat him. In order to live, Khaled must leave Gaza. But there’s currently no way out.   

Khaled is a Ukrainian Palestinian, one of approximately 500 Ukrainian nationals stuck in the Gaza Strip. Oksana moved there with her Gazan husband, a doctor, and raised Khaled and his sisters as dual citizens, speaking Ukrainian in the home and enduring long waits and endless bureaucratic hurdles to visit Oksana’s aging mother in Ukraine.

Last year, when Russia invaded Ukraine, Oksana’s mother fled to Gaza to be with the family. Now she’s in more danger than she was in Ukraine — whereas the war in Ukraine has killed 9,614 civilians and injured 17,535 over 19 months, the Gazan death toll has topped 8,000, with over 15,000 injured, in just three weeks.  

As western governments focus on the release of foreign nationals and dual citizens held hostage by Hamas, no government is helping people like Khaled and his family get out of harm’s way. They’re hostages too, of another sort, in that they’re being kept in Gaza against their will, prevented by Israel and Egypt from leaving the besieged and bombarded territory.  

The Ukrainian government is chartering flights for Ukrainians out of Israel, but no one is assisting the Ukrainians stuck in Gaza, or even reporting much about them — even though their lives are at much greater risk. An Oct. 23 article in The New Voice of Ukraine stated that 337 Ukrainians in Gaza had completed evacuation papers, and that the Ukrainian ambassador to Israel was hopeful they’d be able to leave through the Rafah crossing the next day. But that date came and went, with the ambassador claiming he’s “powerless” and has to “wait in good faith for the evacuation” at the whim of the Israelis and Egyptians.  

If Khaled is to see his next birthday, he needs treatment that he can access only by leaving Gaza. He can’t afford to wait the months that Israel has said its attacks on Gaza will last.  

Even before the current siege and bombings, people living in Gaza needed to leave the territory to access cancer care. Israel has kept the territory under blockade for 16 years, and hospitals have not been fully functional. According to Alice Rothchild, a physician on the board of the Gaza Mental Health Foundation, “There was already almost no cancer therapy available in the Gaza Strip due to the lack of chemotherapy, radiotherapy, as well as radioisotopes for diagnosis. Patients had to apply for multiple medical permits in order to leave for each treatment — mostly in East Jerusalem but sometimes in Israel, Jordan, or Egypt. A significant number of permits were delayed or denied.”  

Now, with Israel consistently bombing the crossing into Egypt and foreign governments unable or unwilling to take the steps to get their citizens out, there is little hope for patients like Khaled. Oksana and her mother contacted the Ukrainian Embassy in Israel, which told her they’re not responsible for Ukrainian citizens in Gaza. She called the Ukrainian Embassy in the West Bank, which also claimed an inability to help. Khaled’s friend in the United States reached out to the Ukrainian Embassy here, begging for help evacuating him and offering to shelter him and his family at her home so he can access treatment at a U.S. hospital. The embassy told Khaled’s friend they cannot provide assistance. She contacted the International Committee for the Red Cross, which referred her back to the embassy. 

The world has been expressing concern for Ukrainians since Russia invaded, with citizens of western countries waving Ukrainian flags and governments helping Ukrainian citizens access refuge. But governments everywhere are abandoning the besieged and bombed people in Gaza — even when they’re the same Ukrainian citizens.  

This is not the first time the world has confronted this paradox.  

On Feb. 24, 2022, USA Today published a fact-check of a viral photo making its way around social media. The photo showed the bombing of two residential high-rise buildings and was captioned “WORLD WAR THREE: Russia has just attacked Ukraine.” USA Today rated this claim, and the photo it relied on, as false, because it was a photo from Gaza in May 2021, of Israel bombing a residential Palestinian neighborhood. A sentence at the end of the article noted simply, “Nearly two dozen Palestinians were killed in the attacks.” That was the end of the viral conversation about the photo.  

Even though bombed-out apartment buildings look similar regardless where they’re located and corpses under rubble look the same regardless of nationality, the world reacts differently to different war zones, depending on who’s affected.  

But what about when it’s the same people in different war zones? Can governments muster the same empathy and assistance for Ukrainians at risk of death in Gaza as they have for Ukrainians at risk of death in Ukraine?  

On Oct. 30, while Khaled waited for an answer to this question, a bomb landed close to the Turkish Palestinian Friendship Hospital and shattered the windows near where he lay. Will any government help Khaled and his family? 

Michelle Lerner is an attorney who volunteers as a mentor with We Are Not Numbers, an organization in which Khaled El-Hissy participates as a writer.