Gaza -

Ukrainian Tatiana al-Mabhouh wears the traditional Palestinian dress and head covering, and sits for long hours daily in front of television screens and news sites, following, moment by moment, the developments of the Russian war on Ukraine.

Tatiana is more interested in following the news coming from the city of Kharkiv, the second largest Ukrainian city after the capital Kyiv, where she grew up, before moving to live in Gaza in 1998, accompanied by her husband, Dr. Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh, who was studying pharmacy at a Ukrainian university.

Tatiana faces great challenges in communicating with her family and friends in the city of Kharkiv, due to the deterioration of communication and Internet services, as a result of what the city was exposed to during the war, which entered its second month in a row.

Tatiana and her husband, Dr. Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh, and long hours in following the Russian war on Ukraine (Al-Jazeera)

remote war

Tatiana's heart was somewhat reassured by the success of her son Ahmed in leaving the city of Kharkiv with his family, and moving to neighboring Poland, but she did not get rid of the anxiety completely. .

Over the 24 years that Tatiana spent in Gaza, during which she learned the Arabic language, and acquired a lot of Palestinian customs and traditions, she tells Al Jazeera Net in the colloquial dialect, "By God, I don't know what to do... I am very upset about the war, and worried about my family and friends."

The few times she succeeds in communicating with her family and friends over the Internet, Tatiana strives to reassure their hearts, drawing on the experiences she gained from living through four wars launched by Israel on Gaza from 2008 until the last war in May last year.


A missile - which Tatiana believes is Russian - landed in front of her family's house in the city of Kharkiv, but it did not explode, and she says, "Praise be to God, my parents are all fine and fine, and if this missile exploded, a massacre would have occurred."

Tatiana's last visits to her family were in 2018, and her husband, Dr. Mahmoud, tells Al Jazeera Net that he had never seen his wife in such a state of fear, anxiety and a lot of nervousness, even during the Israeli wars on Gaza, she had strength and patience.

He added, "This time the situation is different for her, as she is following a war against her country from afar, she has never lived like it before, and anxiety controls her for fear of her family and friends there."

Part of what was destroyed by the Israeli war on Gaza during the last war (Al-Jazeera)

Gaza wars

While Tatiana was holding a mobile phone and trying to contact her family to no avail, she said angrily, "God damn war (..) the innocent are the ones who pay the price."

In the recent Israeli war on Gaza, Tatiana was one of those innocents, when she and her family were forced to leave their home adjacent to a border area in the town of Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip, for fear of Israeli targeting, which is what actually happened, and about this, Dr. Mahmoud says, "We survived ourselves The house was bombed and severely damaged after we left.”

Tatiana told Al Jazeera Net, "There is no difference between death in Gaza and death in Ukraine... Death is death," and added, "But the danger is always present in Gaza, and there are no shelters for civilians."

She added that she spoke with one of her friends, and she was sheltered with about 100 others in a safe and equipped shelter, and when I found her frightened, I worked hard to reassure her, and she only found her experience in Gaza, and she said, "I told her that I and Gaza (about two million Palestinians) were exposed to four Israeli wars. We do not have shelters from the Israeli air, land and sea raids.”

The four Israeli wars are not only Tatiana's story with the "dangers of the occupation", which is staring at Gaza from the Israeli death machines. A few months after her arrival in Gaza, she experienced the events of the Al-Aqsa Intifada that erupted in September 2000, during which Israel practiced various forms of killing and destruction. .

Tatiana is angry at the world's bias and ignoring the Israeli crimes against the Palestinians (Al-Jazeera)

A world that sees with one eye

Anger stifles Tatiana's heart, and she expresses resentment at the world's lamentation over the victims in Ukraine by the fire of the Russian army, while this same world was not shaken by the bloody scenes of safe residential homes destroyed by Israeli air strikes over the heads of their residents, including children and women. Heck... are the Palestinians not human like the Ukrainians?!"

Tatiana did not wait for an answer from anyone to her question, and said as if she was answering herself, "The difference is that those who are killed in Gaza are Israel, and the victims are Palestinian Arabs, not Europeans."

As much as she wishes that the Russian war in Ukraine would stop, and her people there would enjoy security and peace, Tatiana wishes that justice would prevail in this world, and the Palestinian people would regain their land and rights.