Escaping one war only to find second
Family flees Ukraine, but calm short-lived
ASHKELON, Israel — Tatyana Prima thought she’d left the bombs behind when she fled Ukraine more than a year and a half ago, after Russia decimated her city, Mariupol. The 38-year-old escaped with her injured husband and young daughter, bringing the family to safety in southern Israel.
The calm she was slowly regaining shattered again on Oct. 7, when Hamas terrorists invaded.
“All these sounds of war that we hear now, they sometimes work as a trigger that brings back memories of what we’ve gone through in Mariupol,” she said. “It’s hard feeling like that you’re the one responsible for your child, the one who wants what’s best for them, and in some way like you’ve failed them.”
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, more than 45,000 Ukrainians have sought refuge in Israel, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics and aid groups.
Like Prima, most of them were slowly picking up the pieces of their lives and finding ways to cope when the war in Israel erupted. Now they are reliving their trauma.
Some have left Israel, but many remain — refusing to again flee a war. Most have lost in-person support systems due to restrictions around gatherings. Others have lost hope of reuniting with loved ones they left behind.
On Oct. 7, when Hamas terrorists attacked, killing some 1,200 people and taking about 240 hostages, Prima awoke to the sound of alarms. She lives in the coastal city of Ashkelon, a few miles from the Gaza Strip.
The thud of airstrikes and shelling is constant as Israel pushes forward with its retaliatory ground offensive. She describes it as “déjà vu,” reminding her of the morning in Mariupol that forever changed her life.
Mariupol has been one of Ukraine’s hardest-hit cities, besieged and bombarded for weeks as people scrounged for food, water and heat and were cut off from the world with no telecommunications. During the war’s early weeks, Prima cooked over an outdoor fire, used snow for drinking water and sheltered with a dozen relatives on the outskirts of the city, she said.
But the shelling intensified, and rockets fell around them. After her husband’s hand was blown off fetching water, she decided to leave.
“That day marked a descent into hell,” she said.
The family joined a convoy of cars fleeing the city, passing corpses as black ash fell from airstrikes. They went through countless Russian checkpoints and by April 2022 arrived in Israel, where her husband’s relatives lived in Ashkelon. Many Ukrainians live in the country’s south. There’s a large Russian-speaking community, and rent is often lower than in bigger, central cities.
Ashkelon residents were accustomed to occasional rockets from Gaza, but attacks have surged in the war. Air raid sirens are a constant sound. While most rockets are intercepted, about 80 have landed since the war in populated areas or empty fields, accounting for nearly onethird of all Hamas rocket incidents in Israel, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project.
Shelling sounds remind Prima of her agony in Ukraine, yet she remains stoic when speaking about Israel’s war, convinced the army and the country’s Iron Dome defense system will protect her family.
But the war has intensified feelings of isolation, she said. Her community support groups have moved online — in-person gatherings are restricted to buildings with bomb shelters because of the threat of attacks.