Malek Yunis, a university student who has lived in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city, for the past five years, had been eagerly anticipating his graduation from medical school in September, and his subsequent return to his hometown of Arara, a Palestinian village in northern Israel.
But when Russia invaded Ukraine last week, his only thought was reaching safety.
Malek’s situation is not unique, however. Nearly 2,000 Palestinian students with Israeli citizenship are now stranded in Ukraine and forced to make a choice between their education and safety as Ukraine's universities refuse to allow their students to continue their studies abroad via Zoom under threat of repeating the academic year if they left.
Yunis and fellow medical students hid in shelters as the first Russian air strikes tore through the city.
“Kharkiv has become a ghost town,” he told Middle East Eye over the phone.
“In the early hours [of the invasion], we expected that the Russians would only launch a few warning shots, but we later came to realise that a full-blown war was at hand, and no one was able to predict how it would evolve.”
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