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OLGA CHEREVKO SHOWED THE WORLD WHAT’S HAPPENING IN GAZA. ISRAEL
WON’T LET HER RETURN  
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Nir Hasson
January 23, 2026
Haaretz
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_ Olga Cherevko grew up on military bases in Siberia, belonged to a
Christian cult in the U.S. and was sent by the UN to some of the
toughest places in the world. None of that prepared her for what she
saw in Gaza. _

Olga Cherevko in the Gaza Strip. Israel won't explain why she's
barred from returning., Photo credit: Courtesy of OCHA // Haaretz

 

To begin with, all one has to do is look at the photographs Olga
Cherevko has taken: of the body of a woman lying beside a cart struck
by a missile, with mattresses and a family's belongings scattered
around; a wounded man lying on a hospital bed, his legs no thicker
than a broomstick; an ambulance crushed against the front of a
burned-out hospital building; a United Nations vehicle stained with
blood ("We were transporting the body of a man shot in the neck");
children wading knee-deep in water in a tent camp.

Interspersed throughout her Gaza Strip
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photo archive are also moments of startling beauty – a spectacular
sunset over a city of tents, a wedding dress left untouched behind a
shattered display window – as well as several images of Cherevko
herself: blue eyes, a nose ring, carefully applied lipstick and a blue
UN flak jacket.

Her official title for almost two years now is spokesperson for the UN
Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, OCHA. But in the
reality of Gaza, she has found herself involved in much more than that
– including collecting bodies and body parts. It all began during a
tour of the enclave in early 2024, while traveling in a convoy along
Al-Rashid Street, by the sea.

"There was a checkpoint there and I remember seeing multiple dead
bodies on the road," Cherevko says. "Back then we didn't really have a
protocol for collecting them. It's not in our job description
regularly, to be, you know, the undertaker. But obviously this is
something that we had to work out because a decent burial is something
that every person deserves. So we worked it out with Israeli
authorities to allow us to pick up the bodies. Sometimes it's in a
kinetic area [with active combat] and we have to be careful."

A few days before the end of the war, when the cease-fire
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went into effect last October, Cherevko was called on to do it again.

"We were driving through Khan Yunis, and of course, the level of
destruction in Khan Yunis is shocking," she recalls. "Rafah looks less
shocking because it's been leveled
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to the point where you can't even tell that there were buildings at
some point, whereas in Khan Yunis you can tell that there were
buildings, but they're all ruins now.

"We saw two dead men on the side of the street. Someone was crying and
begging us to take them, but the security situation didn't allow us to
pick them up at that time. I don't know if they were his family
members or friends. The weeping man laid one of the bodies in front of
our AV. We asked him to please move him and said that we will send a
team to collect them when it's safer."

Cherevko adds that her team ultimately had to drive around the body.
"Normally we try to coordinate an ambulance to pick the bodies up if
it's not safe for us to do it," she says, "But the problem is when
it's done later, it's rarely successful because dogs get to the bodies
very, very fast. One time we found a spine and some sweatpants on part
of a leg. The rest was eaten by the dogs."

Cherevko has worked in nearly every blighted corner of the world. She
has been to brutal prisons in Liberia, famine-stricken refugee camps
in Somalia, military bases in Afghanistan, areas wiped out by typhoons
in the Philippines, cities destroyed in Syria's civil war and Houthi
strongholds in Yemen. But despite everything she has seen, Gaza
remains an exception.

"The depth of human suffering that I saw in Gaza City," she says, "is
really just beyond my imagination. In any other place, if you have
legs or even if you don't have legs and somebody can carry you, you
can usually run and find a place that is safer," she says. In Gaza,
however, there is nowhere to run. There is no place the war hasn't
touched – it's simply everywhere. 

 
A crushed ambulance outside a Gaza hospital, photographed by
Cherevko. OCHA's detailed reports on the humanitarian situation in the
Gaza Strip infuriated Israel.
 

Cherevko, 47, has an unusual life story. In a number of phone
conversations and during a recent interview in Amman, she tells
Haaretz that she was born in East Germany to a Ukrainian family. Her
father served in the Red Army, and she grew up on Soviet bases across
the empire, many of them in Siberia. Today, her parents live in
Moscow, her partner is British and New York is the only place she
truly feels at home. The very complexity of her identity, in many
ways, epitomizes the spirit of the UN.

At 16, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, she met an American
preacher at her school who was recruiting Russian teenagers for a U.S.
Protestant organization called the Institute in Basic Life Principles.
Only later did she realize it was a fundamentalist Christian cult that
promoted homeschooling, modesty and chauvinism. Its leader, a powerful
figure named Bill Gothard, sought to amass influence by educating
battalions of young people from around the world in his principles and
placing them in the corridors of power in Washington.

"The biggest feature of Bill Gothard's teachings is authority" –
that was how he was described in a 2023 documentary series that
exposed the inner workings of the cult. "Kids obey their parents,
wives obey their husbands. Everyone obeys Bill Gothard."

The organization flew Cherevko to the United States, where she went to
live on a closed campus owned by the cult in Illinois. It was there
that she was first exposed to the differences between life in the
Soviet Union and the West.

"They took us to Walmart to buy the basic things that we needed," she
recalls. "I had never seen a shop that big. There's just so much
stuff. I was so overwhelmed, I had no idea what to do. I was watching
what people were doing and I was doing what they were doing. I
remember getting to the cash register and shaking from being nervous
because I had never seen one of those."  

AT THE CULT'S 'RE-EDUCATION' FACILITY IN TEXAS, GIRLS WERE TAUGHT
COOKING AND SEWING – AND, SHE SAYS, "HOW TO BE SUBMISSIVE AND HOW TO
LISTEN TO YOUR HUSBAND AND TO GOD. YOU WEREN'T ALLOWED TO GO
ANYWHERE."

After spending some time at the campus, the boys were sent for
paramilitary-style training, while the girls were sent to a
"re-education" facility in Texas. The school taught them cooking and
sewing – and, she explains, "how to be submissive and how to listen
to your husband and to God and all this. We weren't allowed to go
anywhere. We were allowed to have a group walk … to the park. At
some point we were told that we shouldn't be holding hands as girls."

According to the cult's principles, women were forbidden to wear pants
and were expected to show complete obedience to men.

Afterward, Cherevko was placed with an American family affiliated with
Gothard's institute, where she experienced serious restrictions and
public punishment, as well as inappropriate sexual behavior on the
part of the head of the household, a clergyman, who hosted her –
things a priest should not be doing, as she puts it.

When she wanted to go away for college, Gothard called her to his
office and made it clear that her dream of staying and studying in the
United States would not come true. "They put me on the plane and sent
me back."

Cherevko then found out that the institute had brought her and the
others to the States on three-month visas, so by the time she left,
over a year later, she was an illegal alien. If it weren't for a
chance encounter, she wouldn't have been able to return.

"On the plane, I met a U.S. congressman who was interested in my
story. I don't remember anything about him [but] I vaguely remember
this conversation and that he wrote a letter to the U.S. Embassy to
allow me to come back."

And, indeed, after a short time, Cherevko did returned to the United
States, where she moved from place to place, trying to support herself
and finish her degree in political science. Eventually, she arrived in
New York City where, one day, she joined a tour of UN headquarters –
and fell in love with the organization. She went on to become a UN
tour guide herself and later joined the organization's communications
department.

In 2008, she received her first assignment at a UN mission – in
Liberia. At the time, the West African country was emerging from a
bloody civil war marked by countless crimes against humanity. Visiting
the country's shocking prisons, Cherevko recalls seeing "an entire
generation of amputees." Later, she saw the high-security detention
center near the Special Court for Sierra Leone, where Liberia's
dictator, Charles Taylor, and his associates were tried for crimes
against humanity. The injustice of it all struck her deeply. 

 
Cherevko in Yemen. She says there was no choice but to wear a black
abaya and a hijab in public. (Credit: Courtesy of OCHA  //  Haaretz)

 

Cherevko: "It just seemed extremely unfair to me that somebody who
stole a loaf of bread would have to spend God knows how long in prison
[under harsh conditions], while a person who has done really terrible
things gets to live a really nice life in confinement. The facilities
that were available to one of the biggest war criminals in history
were like a hotel room."

After completing her mission in Liberia and smaller assignments in
Ghana and Sierra Leone, Cherevko resigned from the UN and went to work
as a civilian for the British Army in Afghanistan. After three years
there, she returned to the UN and was sent to the Philippines as part
of a relief mission following a powerful typhoon that left thousands
dead.

From there, Cherevko went on to the Gaza Strip. It was the summer of
2014, during Operation Protective Edge – the longest and deadliest
round of fighting between Israel and Hamas at the time.

"I look back at that time and the 51 day-long war," she says. "We all
thought it was the most horrible thing to happen to Gaza. The trauma
that we were talking about then, how much it affected the children…
I remember visiting schools back then and the kids' drawings would be
harrowing; they would have dead bodies on the streets and military
machines, guns and tanks."

WHEN I PICK UP A TEENAGER'S BODY WHO'S BEEN EATEN BY DOGS, I THINK
ABOUT HIS MOTHER WHO CAN COME TO THE MORGUE AND IDENTIFY HER CHILD. I
KNOW THAT SHE CAN AT LAST FIND SOME PEACE. MAYBE HE WENT OUT TO FIND
FOOD AND NEVER CAME BACK.

OLGA CHEREVKO

She adds: "But then, fast-forward seven years later, we were in the
middle of something thousands of times worse, and two years later
we're still here."

After those initial three years in the Strip, Cherevko relocated to
Somalia, where she lived in a UN compound. "In Somalia, we were
actually a target for Al Shabaab [an Islamist terrorist group]," she
explains. "They regularly targeted the base. We had a few injuries and
some people killed as well. There was a time when they infiltrated our
base and a contractor was killed."

From Somalia, she experienced Syria's civil war, moving between
Damascus, Aleppo and the northern regions under Kurdish control. In
between, she also worked in Iraq, and later moved to Yemen, under
Houthi rule. "It's very different from other parts of the Middle East
that I have been to," Cherevko recalls. "It's stunning. It's green.
The food's really good. The people are really, really nice. But It's
quite chaotic. You see kids driving buses."

What brought her to Yemen was an extraordinary project aimed at
preventing a massive ecological disaster. Off the coast of that
country, an aging oil tanker had been anchored for decades. As the
civil war in the country intensified, maintenance on the tanker
stopped, yet it still held more than a million tons of crude oil that
could have spilled into the Red Sea at any moment. Experts feared the
disaster would dwarf all previous oil spills combined. The UN set up a
team in Yemen to manage the crisis, successfully pumping the oil out
of the tanker and thus averting catastrophe in the Red Sea.

In photos from the operation, Cherevko is seen climbing onto the old
tanker, dressed in a traditional black abaya and hijab. She later
explained that there was no alternative – she felt extremely
uncomfortable dressing any other way in the public domain there.

 
 
Cherevko aboard an oil tanker in the Red Sea, during her stint in
Yemen. Her team's work help avert an unprecedented ecological
disaster. (photo:  Haaretz)
 

On October 7
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2023, Cherevko was on vacation in Los Angeles after completing her
work in Syria. She immediately felt she had to return to Gaza. She
resigned from her role in Syria, and on January 2, 2024 – less than
three months after the war began – she entered the Strip again.
"When we arrived in Gaza, I didn't recognize the city," she recalls.

Apart from short breaks, she remained in the Strip throughout the war,
living intermittently in Muwasi, Deir al-Balah and Gaza City. Her
accounts and photographs of the last two years revolve around bodies,
displaced people who have nothing left, destruction, hunger and death
in every form. Some images remain seared in her memory, like that of a
young man she saw in the Shifa morgue, sitting beside a small body bag
– with a child inside. It was a girl of about 7, her face bruised
and swollen, with dried blood on it. The man sat beside her, quietly
stroking her hair and weeping.

Or the woman Cherevko met at a UNRWA school, whose son had been killed
in front of her the year before - she was still in shock a year later,
unable to recognize her own family or speak, spending most of her time
crying and screaming, never fully recovering.

Cherevko also photographed a message on the duty roster at Al-Awda
Hospital, posted by Mahmoud Abu Nujaila, a doctor who worked there,
which said: "Whoever stays until the end will tell the story. We did
what we could. Remember us." A month later, Abu Nujeila was killed.

YEMEN'S VERY DIFFERENT FROM OTHER PARTS OF THE MIDDLE EAST THAT I HAVE
BEEN TO. IT'S STUNNING. IT'S GREEN. THE FOOD'S REALLY GOOD. THE PEOPLE
ARE REALLY, REALLY NICE. BUT IT'S QUITE CHAOTIC. YOU SEE KIDS DRIVING
BUSES.

OLGA CHEREVKO

Every time she took a short break outside the Strip, Cherevko returned
with suitcases full of food enough to last until her next trip. During
the period of extreme hunger, no one she knew in Gaza – including
aid workers and doctors – had anything to eat. Those around her,
most of whom had jobs, had no food – after all, you can't eat money.

Last August, at the height of the starvation crisis in Gaza
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Cherevko arrived at Nasser Hospital in the southern part of the Strip,
and was given a tour by one of the doctors. When she asked if there
was a Russian-speaking doctor in the department, remembering meeting
one there the year before, he said: "It's me." She could hardly
believe it was the same person. "He was, I kid you not, one-third of
the person that I had met," she says.

She recalls meeting a 16-year-old boy who had dreamed of becoming a
football player. His brother said he once resembled an American
athlete, but now he was virtually skin and bones – with a scar
running across his chest from a wound he suffered near one of the aid
distribution centers. In the same room was a man with a severe head
wound, also from the distribution center, weighing only 40 kilograms.

It's one thing to die by being shot, Cherevko says. It's another to
slowly die of starvation.

At Rantisi Hospital, she photographed Mariam, a 9-year-old girl who
weighed just 9 kilograms. After seeing other children like her,
Cherevko says, it became clear why parents in Gaza would go to any
lengths to find food for their children – even if it meant going to
places where they risked being killed.

Cherevko recalls one of the last days of the war, when she and
Palestinian paramedics set up a triage point at the Morag Corridor in
the southern Strip – mostly for people shot by Israeli soldiers near
aid trucks
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food distribution centers. Soon, dozens of wounded people began
arriving at the site.

"There was one young man, young boy, with a gunshot to his neck,
around the age of 16 or 18. He was bleeding extremely heavily and he
couldn't speak, so we couldn't ask him his age or name. We stabilized
him and took him to the hospital. But I was thinking to myself how
cheap life has become in Gaza. It's now basically reduced to not just
one 25-kilo bag of flour, but just a chance of getting one 25-kilo bag
of flour."

"I don't recognize Gazan society, the way I knew it back in
2014-2017," she continues. "So much of it is just basic survival.
People tell me, 'I wanted to be this or that. Now all I hope is that I
survive this horror.'" 

 
Cherevko and her colleagues evacuate a body in the Gaza Strip.
 (Haaretz photo)
 

OCHA is a small agency in comparison both to other UN bodies (UNRWA,
the World Food Programme, the World Health Organization, etc.) and to
other aid organizations operating in Gaza. It must be noted that
Israel is waging an all-out battle against UNRWA, the largest
humanitarian body in Gaza, banning Israeli authorities' contacts with
it, demolishing or closing down its offices in Israel, and so on. The
fear is that other such groups will be targeted as well.

For its part, however, OCHA plays a key role Gaza, coordinating and
supervising much of the humanitarian aid being sent in and
distributed. In other words, when an organization wants to bring in
food, personnel, physicians or equipment – or even to move from one
point to another within Gaza – it turns to OCHA to coordinate the
movement with the Israel Defense Forces.

Throughout the war, OCHA also regularly published detailed reports on
the humanitarian situation in Gaza. These reports were written in a
lean, precise style, providing documentation to back up every claim,
and making them the most important source of information about
developments there for much of the international media, the diplomatic
community and governments worldwide.

At the same time, these reports infuriated Israel. The last two OCHA
directors in the Strip were expelled by Israel. The most recent one,
Jonathan Whittall, sparked a serious backlash after he reported the
recovery of the bodies of 15 paramedics who had been shot by the IDF
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in Rafah, in March 2025.

Three months later, at the height of Gaza's hunger crisis, Foreign
Minister Gideon Sa'ar revoked Whittall's residence visa and expelled
him from the country. Sa'ar accused him of "biased and hostile
behavior against Israel that distorted reality and presented falsified
reports." The minister did not specify what exactly was distorted with
respect to OCHA's data, nor did he provide alternative figures.

Following Whittall's expulsion, Cherevko feared she might be next on
Israel's persona non grata list – and that is exactly what happened.
In late October, shortly after the cease-fire went into effect, she
went to Moscow to see her parents and her fiancé. Since then, Israel
has not allowed her to return. She has applied to come back three
times – only to be denied each time, officially for "security
reasons."

IT'S ONE THING TO DIE BY BEING SHOT, CHEREVKO SAYS. IT'S ANOTHER TO
SLOWLY DIE OF STARVATION.

As with similar cases involving doctors and aid workers, Israel has
offered no explanation for turning her down. Haaretz, too, tried to
get answers from the authorities, but with no success. The
humanitarian community operating in Gaza has long recognized the
pattern: Those who report to the world what they see and are exposed
in the media have dramatically reduced chances of returning to the
Strip – no matter how essential their work. Cherevko must now wait
in Jordan for reassignment to another difficult post, somewhere else
in the world.

In conversations we've had since she left the Strip, she repeatedly
emphasizes that it is actually now, after the war has ended, that the
real work of humanitarian organizations begins. Finally, they can
focus on what they truly know how to do: to save lives and begin
reconstruction. Which is why her frustration at being barred entry by
Israel is so profound.

Since the cease-fire has taken effect, Cherevko stresses, it is
humanitarian workers from a whole host of organizations, including the
UN, who have repaired roads, built hospitals, cleared rubble and set
up food distribution points. But in the end, their efforts can only
offer temporary relief: Provision of tents or tarps cannot replace
rebuilding homes or disposing of debris. Such work urgently requires
engineering tools, wood and concrete.

"All of this, of course, is punctuated by the severe, recurrent storms
that not only destroy people's meager belongings, but are also deadly,
whether [because of] crumbling buildings or by taking the lives of
children who are highly susceptible to the cold, when they have barely
just begun to live," Cherevko says.

She worries that the world will lose interest in Gaza, that it will be
forgotten. "I've seen it happen a lot of times, when there is a
cease-fire or even if there isn't a cease-fire but the conflict just
continues forever and ever: People obviously lose interest and
attention, [and] the crisis falls off the radar of the public." In
such situations, the despair and violence will only surge. 

 
Cherevko's photo of a wedding dress behind a shattered display window
in Gaza.  (Haaretz photo)
 

Despite everything, Cherevko's comments do not convey hatred toward
Israel or Israelis. She has friends in Israel and kept in touch with
them even during the war. Since the outbreak of the war over two years
ago, she has not been able to travel to Tel Aviv – not because she
doesn't want to, but because she can't: Almost all UN and
international organization personnel are barred from visiting Israel,
and are transported like hazardous materials, directly from the Kerem
Shalom crossing to the Allenby Bridge or Ben-Gurion airport. Even this
limited and indirect link between Israel and Gaza has effectively been
blocked.

She recalls that in the past, when she visited Tel Aviv, she was
struck by how few Israelis had ever met a Palestinian. "People would
ask me questions about life in Gaza," Cherevko says. The only way to
effect change, she stresses, is through direct encounters – people
meeting, talking and understanding each other. It may sound naive, she
adds, but in reality, it is as simple as that: Gaza is not some
abstract place; it is filled with human beings just like anywhere
else.

"I remember talking to this IDF soldier in 2014," she says. "He was
telling me he was in Shujaiyeh. It was a heavy night [of fighting].
They weren't sure if they were going to make it through the night. And
he saw this donkey tied to a post while bombs were falling. He said,
fuck it, and ran out in the middle of the street and untied the
donkey. 'At least it will have a chance of surviving because it can
run,' he said.

"It was one of the stories that I will always remember. At the end of
the day, we're the same people everywhere. It doesn't matter how
different politics make us or how politicians try to make us believe
we are. We're not. We're exactly the same everywhere. And we, you
know, we want the same things for our children, for our friends, for
our families."

She believes Israeli society is deliberately isolating itself from the
reality of suffering in Gaza, choosing which information it's exposed
to and which it remains blind to.

She mentioned an exchange with an acquaintance last summer. "He texted
me and genuinely asked: Is there starvation in Gaza or is this Hamas
propaganda? I sent him a picture of a friend from 2021, and another
picture of him now. And I said: You tell me. But most Israelis do not
have friends in Gaza to ask."

When she left Afghanistan, Cherevko thought that she would never have
a more interesting job in her life – but her experience in Gaza
proved her wrong. "As humanitarians we talk about saving lives and
making a difference, and it's what motivates us and makes us show up
for work every day," she explains. "But for me it translates into a
much more micro-level difference. When I was sitting there near the
Morag Corridor and we were receiving these casualties, I thought to
myself, if we hadn't been here then a lot more people would have died
today.

"When I pick up a teenager's body who's been eaten by dogs, I think
about his mother who can come to the morgue and identify her child. I
know that she can at last find some peace. Maybe he went out to find
food and never came back. I don't know what goes through a parent's
mind when they have no idea where their child is."

When I ask her about whether she still has any hope, she recalls a
family she met shortly before the cease-fire. They had walked for four
days without finding a tent or a place to set one up. The father was
barefoot, the mother carried a toddler, and two other children walked
alongside, carrying the few possessions the family still had: "The
father had this huge smile on his face. He was so kind, and he was
happy to speak to me and tell me what's happening. He told me,
'Tonight we will sleep here on the street, but maybe tomorrow will be
a better day."

If she didn't have hope, she probably wouldn't have made it here, she
says, recalling a photo she took before leaving Gaza for the last time
– of a mural on a wall that depicted grass, flowers and a little
girl holding the hand of the Palestinian cartoon character Handala,
with two large red words: "Fi Amal" – there is hope.

But the wall, like the vast majority of walls in the Strip, collapsed
in the bombings. "The wall is destroyed," I tell her. "Yes, the wall
is destroyed," she replies with a bitter smile.

_[__NIR HASSON_ [[link removed]]_ is an
Israeli journalist who joined Haaretz in 2005 and has served as its
Jerusalem correspondent since 2008, where he covers Jerusalem affairs,
archaeology, the climate crisis, and humanitarian issues in the Gaza
Strip. He has reported on major Israeli events, including the Second
Lebanon War in 2006, the 2005 disengagement from the Gaza Strip, and
the 2014 Israel-Gaza war._

_Hasson's career also includes a two-year stint as deputy news editor
at Haaretz, during which he handled field assignments across Israel.
His reporting has increasingly focused on the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, including investigations into evacuation warnings during
military operations and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, such as
famine risks and post-ceasefire conditions. In September 2025, Hasson
received the Sokolov Prize for print journalism from the Tel
Aviv-Jaffa Municipality, recognized for his courageous coverage of the
fate of Gaza's residents—a topic often avoided by mainstream Israeli
media.]_

* Olga Cherevko
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* Gaza
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* Palestine
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* Occupied Territories
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* Israel
[[link removed]]
* Israel-Palestine
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* Israel-Gaza War
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* Oct. 7
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* Gaza ceasefire
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* Palestinians
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* IDF
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* war crimes
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* Genocide
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* apartheid
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* UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
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* OCHA
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* United Nations
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* Benjamin Netanyahu
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*
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*
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