BATTLE SCARS

When the war in Gaza broke out, it wasn’t long before Jodie Clark (pictured above) was on a plane from her home in Adelaide back to the Middle East. Clark first lived in Gaza after the 2008 war and stayed there for four years, working for the UN’s Relief and Works Agency.

Before the UN, she spent 21 years with the Australian Army and is an expert in logistics. Now she has one of the most challenging jobs in the Israel-Hamas war: getting aid trucks into the bombed and besieged Gaza Strip.

Clark is the UN’s manager of the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt, and coordinates with Israeli and Egyptian officials to try to increase the amount of aid entering the strip. For the first two months of the war almost no aid or goods entered, after Israel closed the Kerem Shalom border crossing. Since then, it’s increased to around 100 trucks a day, but that’s still barely a trickle. Before the war around 500 trucks entered every day.

The UN blames the shortages on Israel for imposing onerous security checks on trucks, but Israel says donors aren’t sending enough aid to Gaza.

Clark says, “We need police to escort our convoys, but there aren’t many of them and most of their vehicles have been destroyed.”

Looters, including women and children, have been clambering onto the back of aid trucks, taking everything from blankets to baby formula.

“When you can’t feed your family, desperation takes over,” Clark says. “People are doing things you would not expect them to do.

“If you remember back, Gaza had a middle class, they had a comfortable life and lived in apartments. Now everyone lives on the ground, in the dirt and in the sand, with a piece of nylon or tarpaulin over them.”