Ukrainian flees the bombing in her country .. "refugee" in Gaza!

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The Ukrainian pharmacist, Victoria Brig, decided to flee death as a result of the Russian-Ukrainian war, so she left her hometown, but the strange thing is that she sought refuge in the Gaza Strip, which has been witnessing a siege and intermittent wars for many years.

In the details, Victoria, 21, arrived with her Palestinian husband, Ibrahim Saidam, 23, a fourth-year medical student at a Ukrainian university, last week to the Gaza Strip through the Rafah border crossing with Egypt.

The young woman, who has been married for more than two years, describes the journey as "difficult", and recounts that she and her husband decided to leave Ukraine in late February, as the fighting approached their place of residence in Vinnytsia, 200 km southwest of the capital, Kyiv.

"We heard very loud explosions, then we expected the worst," she says with a sigh.

"We did not know what would happen to us tomorrow, so we decided to leave. Staying was really dangerous," she added.

Less than two weeks after the couple's departure, Russian forces destroyed the airport in the city of Vinnytsia, and Ukrainian ambulances announced at the time that nine people had been killed in the bombing.

The Gaza Strip, a narrow coastal strip inhabited by 2.3 million Palestinians, has fought four wars since 2008, the last of which was last May, when about 266 Palestinians were killed, including 66 children, and the bombing completely destroyed about 1,600 homes, and damaged in varying ways more than 60,000 homes. However, the couple concluded that the Gaza Strip might be safer.

"We know the reality here, of course there has been a war in the Strip and it may be renewed again, but when we were forced to leave Ukraine, it was safe in Gaza," Victoria told AFP.

"We don't know what will happen tomorrow, we pray for the best," she added, sitting in her husband's family home.

The Ukrainian young woman, who is still living in shock, did not hide her concern for her sister (20 years), who remained and her younger brother (12 years) in Ukraine, while their mother left to join her three children residing in Estonia.

On the escape journey, Saidam explains how they fled to the Romanian border in a bus that took them with about twenty other Palestinians.

And 15 kilometers from the border with Romania, the bus stopped due to overcrowding, forcing them to continue the journey on foot for about four hours to the border, where they were received by Romanian forces.

The couple spent one night in a Romanian town near the border, before they boarded the train together the next day, heading to the capital Bucharest, where they were received by members of the Palestinian community.

About 4,000 Palestinians live in Ukraine, and the Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has worked since the beginning of the Russian invasion to evacuate between 2,500 to 3,000 of them.

On the other hand, the Ukrainian representation to the Palestinian Authority confirmed to AFP that about 3,000 Ukrainians live in the Palestinian territories, 2,500 of them in the Gaza Strip.

Two months after her marriage, Victoria converted to Islam and wore the hijab.

The young woman in her twenties could not control herself and shed tears while following the news of the war in her homeland on television and through social networking sites.

As for Saidam, who grew up in Gaza, he says, "I lived through three wars in the Gaza Strip that were enough to give me experience" of dealing with the situation.

"A week before the start of the war in Ukraine, I had prepared supplies in reserve, but we did not expect the war to be so fierce," he added.

The young man states that he was able to apply for humanitarian asylum in any European country.

"But I preferred to go back to Gaza because I feel safe here. I felt that Gaza was the perfect choice for us. It was an opportunity for my family to get to know my Ukrainian wife."

Victoria hopes that the war will end and return to her country.

"I dream that Russia will stop its work and that the day will come when my husband and I will return to my home and live in my country again," she says.

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