It’s been three years since we checked in with Jean Calder, the 82-year-old Australian who made a home in Gaza and devoted herself to the care of physically disabled children.
The occasion, back in 2015, was the first anniversary of a war that killed 2300 Palestinians and injured 10,000 more after the Israeli Defence Forces went in. Their third incursion into Gaza in six years cost the lives of 67 IDF soldiers and six civilians in Israel.
Caught in the thick of the fighting in Khan Younis, at the bottom end of the densely populated strip, Dr Calder doesn’t know how she came through unscathed in 2014. “I don’t remember all that much about it,” she said quietly. “It was such a terrible, frightening time.”
Yet for 48 nail-biting hours this week, a fourth and potentially bloodier clash loomed between the Israelis and Hamas, the militant Islamist group that calls the shots in Gaza. And once again, the oasis of kindness that Dr Calder created in Khan Younis was dragged into the firing line.
What was supposed to be a covert raid by Israeli commandos went disastrously awry there last Sunday, heightening tensions that had simmered through the northern summer as Israel and Hamas traded tit-for-tat attacks, with rockets launched from Gaza in response to IDF fire on mass Palestinian protests at the border.
Read the article by Jamie Walker in The Australian.