Elizabeth Tsurkov

Elizabeth Tsurkov was born in 1986 in Saint Petersburg

Tsurkov was born on 11 November 1986 in Leningrad, now Saint Petersburg, to Jewish parents. Her family immigrated to Israel when she was four. They lived first on a kibbutz and later in the settlement of Kfar Eldad.

She earned a bachelor's degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and began learning Levantine Arabic in 2011. She received a master's degree in Middle Eastern studies from Tel Aviv University and another in political science from the University of Chicago. She became a doctoral student in politics at Princeton University.

She worked with human rights groups, including Gisha and the Hotline for Refugees and Migrants, and served as an assistant to Natan Sharansky from 2006 to 2008. She was a fellow at the New Lines Institute and active in the Regional Thinking Forum. She wrote about the Middle East and the Syrian civil war for outlets such as Haaretz and The New York Times.

From 2019 she traveled to Iraq on her Russian passport for research. In March 2023 she was abducted in Baghdad while doing field work for her doctorate and was held by Kata'ib Hezbollah. A video released in November 2023 showed her saying she worked for the CIA and Mossad, which her family denied. She was released in September 2025.