Olga Cherevko Showed the World What’s Happening in Gaza. Israel Won’t Let Her Return

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

Nir Hasson

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

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 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 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 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.

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: “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.

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.

On October 7, 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.

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, 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 or 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.'”

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 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.

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.

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