Daily Report 20 4 2025
ISRAEL-PALESTINE MEDIA REPORT
20.4.25
Israeli strikes pound Gaza as Hamas rejects new truce
Canberra Times | Nidal Al-Mughrabi, Jaidaa Taha & Alexander Cornwell | 20 April 2025
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he has instructed the military to intensify pressure on Hamas after the Palestinian militant group rejected an Israeli proposal for another temporary truce, instead demanding a deal to end the war in exchange for the release of hostages.
In a late-night televised address on Saturday, Netanyahu said while war came with a heavy price, Israel had “no choice but to continue fighting for our very existence, until victory”.
Egyptian mediators have been working to restore the ceasefire, which Israel abandoned in March after seeking to extend a temporary truce in which 38 hostages were released.
Hamas, whose militants carried out the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel that triggered the war, has said it would only free the remaining hostages under a deal that ends the war.
Earlier on Saturday, Hamas said that it had recovered the body of a guard killed in an Israeli air strike this week and who was holding Edan Alexander, an Israeli dual national soldier believed to be the last American citizen held alive in Gaza.
The fate of Alexander was unknown, Hamas said. Netanyahu did not mention Alexander in his remarks.
Israel has pounded Gaza with air strikes since the ceasefire collapsed. Palestinian health authorities said at least 50 Palestinians had been killed in strikes on Saturday.
President Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff said in March that freeing Alexander, a 21-year-old New Jersey native who was serving in the Israeli army when he was captured during the October 7, 2023 attacks, was a “top priority”.
His release was at the centre of talks held between Hamas leaders and US negotiator Adam Boehler in March.
Hamas had said on Tuesday that it had lost contact with the militants holding Alexander after their location was hit in an Israeli attack.
Fewer than half of the 59 hostages still held in Gaza are believed to remain alive.
Israel put Gaza under a total blockade in March and restarted its assault on March 18 after talks failed to extend the ceasefire. Hamas says it will free remaining hostages only under an agreement that permanently ends the war; Israel says it will agree only to a temporary pause.
Since renewing its attacks, Israel has seized swathes of Gaza and ordered hundreds of thousands of residents to evacuate in what Palestinians fear is a step towards permanently depopulating swathes of land. The Gaza health ministry says 1600 people have been killed in the past month.
Palestinian health officials said the military had escalated its strikes across the Gaza Strip, killing at least 92 people in the past 48 hours, at least 50 of them on Saturday.
On Friday, the Israeli military said it hit about 40 targets across the enclave over the past day. The military on Saturday announced that a 35-year-old soldier had died in combat in Gaza.
Netanyahu spoke after a second indirect meeting between US and Iranian officials where the sides agreed to start drawing up a framework for a potential nuclear deal.
Oman, which is mediating between the countries, stated that discussions aim to reach a binding agreement ensuring Iran is completely free of nuclear weapons and sanctions, while maintaining its ability to develop peaceful nuclear energy.
In his televised address, Netanyahu said he was committed to preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.
Hamas on Saturday also released an undated and edited video of Israeli hostage Elkana Bohbot. Hamas has released several videos over the course of the war of hostages begging to be released. Israeli officials have dismissed past videos as propaganda.
The war was triggered by Hamas’ October 7 attack on southern Israel in 2023, in which 1200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage to Gaza, according to Israeli tallies.
Since then, more than 51,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli offensive, according to local health authorities.
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Israeli strikes on Gaza kill more than 90 people in 48 hours, Gaza’s health ministry says
ABC / AP | 20 April 2025
- Israeli strikes in Gaza have killed more than 90 people in the past 48 hours, Gaza’s health ministry says.
- Israeli troops have ramped up attacks in an effort to put pressure on Hamas to release its hostages.
- World Health Organization officials have urged the new US ambassador in Israel to push the country to lift Gaza’s blockade so medicines and other aid can enter the strip.
Israeli strikes in Gaza have killed more than 90 people in the past 48 hours, the Gaza Health Ministry said, as Israeli troops ramp up attacks to pressure Hamas to release its hostages.
The dead include 15 people killed on Saturday local time, including women and children, some of whom were sheltering in a designated humanitarian zone, hospital staff said.
At least 11 people were killed in the southern city of Khan Younis, several of them in a tent in the Mwasi area where hundreds of thousands of displaced people are living, a hospital worker said.
Israel has designated it as a humanitarian zone.
Four other people were killed in separate strikes in Rafah city, including a mother and her daughter, according to the European Hospital where the bodies were brought.
Israel intensifies Gaza attacks
Israel has vowed to intensify attacks across Gaza and occupy large “security zones” inside the strip.
For six weeks Israel also has blockaded Gaza, barring the entry of food and other goods.
Aid groups have raised the alarm this week, saying thousands of children have become malnourished.
Most people are barely eating one meal a day as stocks dwindle, according to the United Nations.
Dr Hanan Balkhy, the head of the World Health Organization’s eastern Mediterranean office, urged the new US ambassador in Israel, Mike Huckabee, to push the country to lift Gaza’s blockade so medicines and other aid can enter the strip.
“I would wish for him to go in and see the situation firsthand,” she said.
Huckabee’s first appearance as US ambassador
In his first appearance as ambassador on Friday, Mr Huckabee visited the Western Wall, the holiest Jewish prayer site in Jerusalem’s Old City.
He inserted a prayer into the wall, which he said was handwritten by US President Donald Trump.
Mr Huckabee said every effort was being made to bring home the remaining hostages held by Hamas.
The war began when Hamas-led militants attacked southern Israel on October 7, 2023, killing about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting 251.
Most of the hostages have since been released in ceasefire agreements or other deals.
Israel’s offensive has since killed more than 51,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
The war has destroyed vast parts of Gaza and most of its food production capabilities.
It has also displaced around 90 per cent of the population, with hundreds of thousands of people living in tent camps and bombed-out buildings.
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Despair in Gaza as Israeli aid blockade creates crisis ‘unmatched in severity’
Palestinians pushed into new misery as supplies of food, fuel and medicine run out in seven-week siege
The Guardian | Bethan McKernan 20 April 2025
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/19/gaza-palestinians-israeli-aid-blockade
Gaza has been pushed to new depths of despair, civilians, medics and humanitarian workers say, by the unprecedented seven-week-long Israeli military blockade that has cut off all aid to the strip.
The siege has left the Palestinian territory facing conditions unmatched in severity since the beginning of the war as residents grapple with sweeping new evacuation orders, the renewed bombing of civilian infrastructure such as hospitals, and the exhaustion of food, fuel for generators and medical supplies.
Israel unilaterally abandoned a two-month ceasefire with Palestinian militant group Hamas on 2 March, cutting off vital supplies. Just over two weeks later, it resumed large-scale bombing and redeployed ground troops withdrawn during the truce.
Since then, political figures and security officials have repeatedly vowed that aid deliveries will not resume until Hamas releases the remaining hostages seized during the 7 October 2023 attacks that ignited the conflict. Israel’s government has framed the new siege as a security measure and has repeatedly denied using starvation as a weapon, which would constitute a war crime.
The blockade is now entering its eighth week, making it the longest continuous total siege the strip has faced to date in the 18-month war.
Firmly supported by the US, its most important ally under Donald Trump, Israel appears confident that it can maintain the siege with little international pushback.
It is also moving ahead with large-scale seizures of Palestinian land for security buffer zones, and plans to shift control of aid delivery to the army and private contractors, exacerbating fears in Gaza that Israel intends to maintain boots on the ground in the territory long-term and permanently displace its residents.
Many people the Observer spoke tosaid they are now more afraid of famine than airstrikes. “Many times, I have had to give up my share of food for my son because of the severe shortages. It is the hunger that will kill me – a slow death,” said Hikmat al-Masri, a 44-year-old university lecturer from Beit Lahia in north Gaza.
Food stockpiled during the two-month-ceasefire has run out, and desperate people across the territory are jostling at charity kitchens with empty pots and bowls. Goods at markets are now selling for 1,400% above ceasefire prices, according to the latest assessment from the World Health Organization.
An estimated 420,000 people are on the move again because of new Israeli evacuation orders, making it difficult to compile hard data on hunger and malnutrition, but Oxfam estimates that most children are now surviving on less than one meal a day.
About 95% of aid organisations have suspended or cut back services because of airstrikes and the blockade, and since February, Israel has tightened restrictions for international staff to enter Gaza. Basic medical supplies – even painkillers – are running out.
“Gaza City is packed with displaced people who have fled Israeli troops moving into the north, and they are living on the street or putting their tents inside damaged buildings that are going to collapse,” said Amande Bazerolle, the Gaza emergency coordinator for Médecins Sans Frontières, speaking from Deir al-Balah.
Bazerolle added: “There are not enough points of care for so many people. At our burns clinic in Gaza City, we are refusing patients by 10am and we have to tell them to come back the next day, as we are triaging to make our drug supplies last as long as possible.”
The siege has been accompanied by a fierce push by Israeli forces on northern Gaza as well as the entirety of Rafah, the strip’s southernmost city, cutting the territory off from Egypt.
According to the UN, approximately 70% of Gaza is now under Israeli evacuation orders or has been subsumed into expanding military buffer zones; the new Rafah security zone totals one-fifth of the entire territory.
The land seizures are pushing the 2.3 million population – and aid and medical efforts – into ever-smaller Israeli-designated “humanitarian zones”, although an Israeli airstrike last week on al-Mawasi, the biggest such zone on the coast of southern Gaza, killed 16 people.
As the space they can operate in shrinks, aid workers said they are worried that that the rules of engagement followed by the Israeli military have changed since the ceasefire collapsed, pointing to the recent bombings of Nasser hospital in Khan Younis and al-Ahli hospital in Gaza City.
Two people were killed in the Nasser attack, which hit a building where members of an international medical team were present. No casualties were reported in the al-Ahli strike, but the intensive care and surgery departments of the hospital were destroyed, medics said. In both cases, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it had targeted Hamas militants.
“People in Gaza like having international staff around because they assume it affords them more protection and the IDF is less likely to attack the building or the area,” said a senior aid official, who asked not to be named so as to speak freely.
“In the beginning of the war, if there was an airstrike two kilometres away from our location, we would evacuate… eventually, that became 300 metres, and now it’s 30 metres, if [the IDF] hits the building next door.
“There are either no warnings, or sometimes 20 minutes, which is not enough time to evacuate sick people. Our exposure to risk is getting higher… We know the Israelis are trying to force us to work under their terms.”
In a statement in response to the aid worker’s allegations, the IDF said: “Hamas has a documented practice of operating within densely populated areas. Strikes on military targets are subject to relevant provisions of international law, including taking feasible precautions.” It referred questions about aid to the political echelon.
Israel has long alleged that Hamas siphons off large amounts of the aid that has reached Gaza, allowing the group to maintain its control by either keeping the aid for itself or selling it at marked-up prices to desperate civilians.
Last week, Israeli media reported that efforts to sidestep international agencies and create an Israeli-controlled mechanism to distribute aid using private contractors are under way but still in the “early stages”, with no timeframe for implementation. In the interim, the humanitarian crisis will only worsen, aid agencies say.
International mediators are attempting to revive ceasefire talks, but there is little sign either side has moved closer on fundamental issues such as the disarmament of Hamas and the withdrawal of Israeli troops.
Masri, the lecturer from Beit Lahia, said: “When the blockade was imposed again and the war resumed, I felt terrified. I constantly think about my little son, and how I can provide him with basic necessities.
“No one can imagine the level of suffering… Death surrounds us from every direction.”
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‘If I die, I want a loud death’: Gaza photojournalist killed by Israeli airstrike
Fatima Hassouna, who had been documenting war in Gaza for 18 months and was subject of new documentary, killed along with 10 members of her family
The Guardian | Hannah Ellis-Petersen | 19 April 2025
As a young photojournalist living in Gaza, Fatima Hassouna knew that death was always at her doorstep. As she spent the past 18 months of war documenting airstrikes, the demolition of her home, the endless displacement and the killing of 11 family members, all she demanded was that she not be allowed to go quietly.
“If I die, I want a loud death,” Hassouna wrote on social media. “I don’t want to be just breaking news, or a number in a group, I want a death that the world will hear, an impact that will remain through time, and a timeless image that cannot be buried by time or place.”
On Wednesday, just days before her wedding, 25-year-old Hassouna was killed in an Israeli airstrike that hit her home in northern Gaza. Ten members of her family, including her pregnant sister, were also killed.
The Israeli military said it had been a targeted strike on a Hamas member involved in attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians.
Twenty-four hours before she was killed, it was announced that a documentary focusing on Hassouna’s life in Gaza since the Israeli offensive began would be debuted at a French independent film festival that runs parallel to Cannes.
Made by the Iranian director Sepideh Farsi, the film, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, tells the story of Gaza’s ordeal and the daily life of Palestinians through filmed video conversations between Hassouna and Farsi. As Farsi described it, Hassouna became “my eyes in Gaza … fiery and full of life. I filmed her laughs, her tears, her hopes and her depression”.
“She was such a light, so talented. When you see the film you’ll understand,” Farsi told Deadline. “I had talked to her a few hours before to tell her that the film was in Cannes and to invite her.”
She said she had lived in fear for Hassouna’s life but added: “I told myself I had no right to fear for her, if she herself was not afraid. I clung to her strength, to her unwavering faith.”
Farsi, who lives in exile in France, said she feared that Hassouna had been targeted for her much-followed work as a photojournalist and recently publicised participation in the documentary. Gaza has been the deadliest conflict for journalists in recent history, with more than 170 killed since 2023, though some estimates put it as high as 206.
Since Israel began its bombardment of Gaza, after the attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, more than 51,000 people have been killed, more than half of them women and children, according to the Gaza health ministry. Since the ceasefire with Hamas collapsed in March, Israel has resumed its deadly airstrikes with vigour, and at least 30 people were killed in strikes on Friday.
Fellow journalists in Gaza reacted with grief and anger at the news that an Israeli airstrike had taken Hassouna from them, just as she had feared it would. “She documented massacres through her lens, amid bombardment and gunfire, capturing the people’s pain and screams in her photographs,” said Anas al-Shareef, an Al Jazeera reporter based in Gaza.
Miqdad Jameel, another Gaza-based journalist, called on people to “see her photos, read her words – witness Gaza’s life, the struggle of its children in war, through her images and her lens”.
Her death prompted a statement from the Cannes Acid film festival, where Farsi’s documentary will be screened in May. “We had watched and programmed a film in which this young woman’s life force seemed like a miracle,” they said. “Her smile was as magical as her tenacity. Bearing witness, photographing Gaza, distributing food despite the bombs, mourning and hunger. We heard her story, rejoiced at each of her appearances to see her alive, we feared for her.”
Haidar al-Ghazali, a Palestinian poet in Gaza, said in a post on Instagram that before she was killed, Hassouna had asked him to write a poem for her when she died.
Speaking of her arrival into a kinder afterlife, it read: “Today’s sun won’t bring harm. The plants in the pots will arrange themselves for a gentle visitor. It will be bright enough to help mothers to dry their laundry quickly, and cool enough for the children to play all day. Today’s sun will not be harsh on anyone.”
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Hostile and deeply divided: In south-west Sydney, it’s an election campaign like never before
Sydney Morning Herald | Eryk Bagshaw and Kayla Olaya | 20 April 2025
Jihad Dib is worried. “There is a change,” he says. “You can feel the change.”
The state Labor minister, transformative education leader and the first NSW MP to take his oath on a Quran has never seen an election campaign like this.
It is personal, deeply divided and increasingly hostile. And it is being driven by sophisticated social media campaigns that have splintered communities, forced Labor ministers out of mosques and littered streets with corflutes stained blood-red.
“In the last 14 years of participating in elections, I’ve never seen a campaign as dirty as this one,” says Dr Jamal Rifi, a Muslim community leader in south-western Sydney.
The allegations are flying from both sides: claims of censorship and bullying, candidates being pushed out of events, and the defacing of campaign materials.
Three cabinet ministers and potential future prime ministers have held this ground since before the global financial crisis: Tony Burke, Jason Clare, and Chris Bowen. Their electorates and neighbouring Werriwa and Fowler cut like a pizza slice through south-west Sydney.
The stakes are high, and the swing is on. Nationally, Labor is polling ahead of the Coalition. Still, Labor operatives here believe the heartland seats of Blaxland and Watson could be hit with swings against Labor of more than 6 per cent, as independents Ahmed Ouf and Ziad Basyouny mount teal-like challenges to incumbents. Clare holds Blaxland on a margin of 13 per cent. Next door, Burke holds Watson on a margin of 15 per cent.
“It is not panic stations,” says one senior Labor figure who asked not to be identified to speak freely. “But I think there will be a lot of protest votes.”
Bowen, the Energy Minister and MP for McMahon, is circumspect. “I would expect all the western Sydney cabinet members to be returned, but no one’s taking anything for granted.”
Instead of pulling away in the polls as it has elsewhere, the government is increasingly relying on preferences flowing from voters who could never countenance putting the Liberals second. Opposition leader Peter Dutton’s history of targeting migrants from the Middle East in areas where the most common language spoken at home is Arabic, not English, is deeply resented in the community.
But Labor has not faced a threat like this in seats like these before – sophisticated, independent campaigns run by former Labor members and volunteers using the momentum of a singular emotive issue: Palestine, to mount an assault on its handling of the cost of living, housing, education and health.
“I think it’s too late in some respects for the major parties to reverse that trend,” says the executive director for the Centre for Western Sydney, Andy Marks.
“The drop-off in support [for the major parties] has been going on for decades. It’s more accelerated in western Sydney, and I think that will continue.”
In Blaxland, 300 volunteers are transforming the electorate into the “Orange City” for Ouf’s campaign. He spends each day handing out hundreds of orange balloons at school pick-ups. Two hundred more are doing the same in turquoise for Basyouny in Watson next door.
From 6am to 9pm they hit the shops along the arteries that carve through these diverse electorates, where weekly incomes are $200 below the state median, housing and rental stress is 10 per cent higher than the rest of NSW, and the parents of two-thirds of residents were born overseas.
For the first time in her life, Peri Kiratli will not be voting Labor. “That’s all we knew, that’s all we’ve been doing,” she said.
“I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but if you put a Labor photo on a donkey in Auburn, they’ll still vote for the donkey because they’re so used to Labor.”
The 49-year-old says it’s time to give someone else a go. “The independents, let’s see if it makes a difference. Let’s see if they keep their promises.”
Gamel Kheir, the secretary of the Lebanese Muslim Association, says there has been “a seismic shift in the way we talk and relate to politicians”.
“We’re dealing with people like me, third-generation Australians, who have learnt that their vote is not taken as a fait accompli any more,” he says.
Basyouny and Ouf’s WhatsApp groups are filled with the children of migrants who once delivered election after election for Paul Keating, Gough Whitlam, Bowen, Burke and Clare – all proud sons of western Sydney. They have shed their parents’ war-born reluctance to challenge authority. Now they are outraged by Labor’s moderate position on Gaza, and the housing, education and infrastructure outcomes that have seen them lag their peers in the east for all the 70 years that the party has held power in these areas.
“The best migrant is the infant Australian,” a 25-year-old Keating said in his maiden speech as the member for Blaxland in 1970. He urged parliament to consider “the enormous cost of bringing migrants to this country”.
By the time he left office as prime minister in 1996, the demographics of his electorate were unrecognisable: 40 per cent of residents were born overseas, most of them from Lebanon and Vietnam. The economics were not. Keating railed against the cost of living, inflation and infrastructure, topics that still confound his successors to this day.
“I would like to be able to describe my electorate as a scenic district, as something of beauty, but, unfortunately, I cannot,” Keating said. “The suburbs within the Blaxland electorate would serve as some of the best examples of chaotic development that can be seen.”
In 2008, Clare despaired that Blaxland was “the mortgage stress capital of Australia”. Two decades later, nearly 30 per cent of the electorate is still in mortgage stress, almost double the state average. Across Blaxland, Watson, McMahon, Werriwa and Fowler, financial fatigue has been driven by lower median weekly incomes and higher unemployment.
Nassim Mohaminade, a Liberal supporter who will vote independent for the first time, says business is down at his barbecue restaurant in Auburn by 50 per cent.
“This is the government’s fault,” he says. “You are the head of your family. If you are not supporting them, how are they going to survive?”
Marks says the teals won support in other parts of Sydney based on national issues such as integrity, women in politics and climate.
“But in western Sydney, it’s very much about your ability to get to your job, child care availability, and access to education. It’s things that are happening in your neighbourhood, rather than a national agenda,” he says. “This is where Labor has become a bit distracted.”
Labor’s success at all three levels of government in this area may also be its Achilles’ heel. The council election results from September are an ominous portent.
In Cumberland, Labor was hit with a swing of 16.9 per cent. In Canterbury-Bankstown and Liverpool it was more than 6 per cent.
“I’ve spoken to so many MPs. I’ve spoken to the council members, nothing’s changing,” says Kiratli, the Condell Park business owner.
The same frustration drove Ouf, the Egyptian son of a Red Crescent surgeon, away from supporting the party and towards his tilt at parliament.
In the summer of 2019, his son Ibrahim, 13, went for a swim at a popular swimming hole in the Royal National Park. When another swimmer jumped on Ibrahim from the cliff above, it permanently severed the nerve between his spine and his shoulder.
“His brain can’t see his arm,” says Ouf.
But Ibrahim was determined to get back in the water. Auburn Swimming Club was his saviour.
“For Ibrahim, swimming is not just a sport. It distracted him from the loss of his arm,” says Ouf.
The battle for south-west Sydney
The government is facing a challenge from independents in the Labor heartland.
Ibrahim blossomed. He took up butterfly, a stroke that is hard enough with two arms, let alone one. Then the program faced funding cuts. Its rank plummeted. Families withdrew their kids, and coaches left.
“They say people from overseas, the immigrants, they don’t value sports,” says Ouf. “We couldn’t reach anyone in the council to help us fix the issue and save the club.”
Ouf and his wife were forced to drive an hour each way to Blacktown to keep Ibrahim’s dream of making the Paralympics alive.
The experience lit a fire in Ouf. Through gridlock, he noticed the school playgrounds with holes in them (public schools in Paddington and Vaucluse received more taxpayer funding per student than some schools in Liverpool and Campbelltown last year), the disparity in healthcare services, and home owners struggling to make ends meet.
“The gap between those who are living in Blaxland and those who are living in the city is growing, and nothing has been done to fix it,” he says.
“Believe me, 99 per cent of those who came here from Lebanon, from Egypt, from China, what motivated them to cross the ocean? It’s because they want to contribute. They want to build something for the kids.”
Labor MPs point to the substantial investments in the region under their watch. The fibro shacks that characterised the area have been replaced with new apartment blocks, urgent care clinics are springing up, and the Sydney Metro is expanding to Bankstown. But the major parties’ penchant for mixing the local and the national has meant that council and state-based problems are conflated with the responsibilities of the federal government.
“In the last week, we’ve seen both the prime minister and the opposition leader come out and promise upgrades to local connecting roads,” says Marks.
“I can’t think of another country in the world where the leader of the nation decides to dine out on an upgrade to a road, and the opposition leader decides to pile in as well. It’s just such small and narrow thinking about what is effectively the most dynamic, fastest growing and exciting region in the country.”
Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show that despite still lagging the eastern suburbs, south-west Sydney is now wealthier than ever before.
“I think where the frustration might come from is there’s an expectation that so much more could happen,” says Dib.
The very services Labor says it has delivered have also seen residents rightly push for more as they become more educated and politically active.
“We are just reaching our first wave of political activation here in the west,” says Dr Mohamad Assoum, a former Labor member of 17 years who is running Ouf and Basyouny’s campaigns after leaving the party over its position on the war in Gaza.
Assoum’s decision to defect, like others, including former Labor senator Fatima Payman, shows how perilous the conflict in the Middle East has become for Labor, with members unable to reconcile the party’s position with their view on a war that has taken more than 60,000 lives, including close relatives, since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7.
“There is a level of tension,” says Dib. “It’s trauma on top of trauma.”
“There’s that feeling among some quarters that Labor could have done more, the government could have done more … The general thing is: ‘Oh, look, we really like what you’re doing. We like you. We know you, but you know we’re just angry.’ ”
Labor supports a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine and voted in favour of enabling more Palestinian participation at the United Nations. Months after coming to office in 2022, it reversed the Coalition’s decision to move the Australian embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Burke was criticised by the Coalition last year for “rolling out the red carpet” to Palestinian migrants after he personally met with refugees to give them protection visas.
But for some voters, nothing short of declaring Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide will be enough.
“I just think they find [politicians] hypocritical,” says Kiratli. “You’re supporting one thing, and then coming to a Muslim get-together. How does that work? You’re OK with Muslims being killed in Gaza, but at the same time, you come into a Muslim Ramadan, how does that work?”
Ouf, Basyouny and Kheir all describe Gaza as “the straw that broke the camel’s back”.
Payman’s new party, Australia Votes, is one of myriad new political organisations that have sprung up in response to the conflict, including Muslim Votes, The Muslim Vote and Stand4Palestine.
Stand4Palestine, which has links to Hizb ut-Tahrir, an Islamic fundamentalist organisation, forced Burke and Clare to abandon plans to visit local mosques at the end of Ramadan after threats to their security. In Victoria, the group celebrated when Liberal MP Jason Wood was booed out of a mosque in Dandenong after promising $6.5 million in funding to upgrade its facilities if the Coalition wins the election, fuelling claims the opposition was attempting to buy votes on one of Islam’s holiest days.
Kheir, who operates one of the state’s largest mosques in Lakemba, says the decades-old model of political leaders making pitches to Muslim religious gatherings is dead.
“We used to do that because our fathers believed this was the way that you engage politicians,” he says. “I think we’ve realised now that these places should be sacrosanct.
“The greatest thing that’s come out of this is not so much The Muslim Vote because I don’t think it will have a future. But what’s come out of it is that there is a future for involvement and engagement in politics with the community.”
Rifi is less optimistic. Younger leaders view him as a member of the old guard of predominantly Lebanese leaders who have dominated local leadership positions since the Cronulla Riots.
“It’s not about age. It’s about maturity,” Rifi says. “They are the copy and paste generation. We are the heavy builders’ generation, a generation that stands on foundations, not on quicksand.
“They are the generation that is exploiting the suffering of Gaza. We are the generation that has always respected the suffering of Palestinians. They have no idea about the division that they are causing in the community.
“I lived in a sectarian country, I know what the dangers of it are.”
The campaigns have seen community leaders who attended an Iftar dinner with Labor MPs shamed on social media. “It’s bullying,” says one senior Labor figure. “I was shocked.”
Ouf and Basyouny claim they have also been targeted by Labor supporters who have pulled down campaign materials and stopped them from campaigning outside schools and community events. Ouf has funded his campaign by selling his $40,000 Toyota Kluger.
In March, Ouf claims he was stopped by Cumberland Council officials from campaigning at the Nowruz festival in Merrylands. The council allowed Clare, the local MP, to not only campaign but take the stage at the festival, promoting him in a video that was later deleted from the council’s Facebook page.
“It’s unacceptable,” says Ouf.
Cumberland Council said it was “disappointed” public displays had become political, but did not comment on the claims that council officers denied Ouf entry to campaign at the festival.
Clare has been at the forefront of Labor’s national campaign as the party’s spokesman, limiting his presence in the electorate. He and Burke did not respond to requests for comment on the local campaign.
“Welcome to Liverpool, mate, this is my old hood,” Clare told ABC Radio Sydney in Liverpool on Tuesday in a segment dedicated to the issues in south-west Sydney. But he used most of his airtime to spruik Labor’s national education and housing policies. Donald Trump was mentioned more than Blaxland.
Clare’s opponents have taken to calling him “Casper Clare”. “He turns up at an event as a friendly face, then disappears like a ghost,” said one Ouf supporter.
Labor figures believe his street campaigning skills will see him prevail in the final two weeks of the campaign. They are confident of holding McMahon and Werriwa, while going on the offensive in Fowler with local Labor candidate Tu Le. Independent Dai Le won the seat in 2022 in a campaign that Basyouny and Ouf have modelled theirs on.
The strategists are more worried about Burke. Burke has a high profile as home affairs minister and has earned goodwill in the community, but he is facing Basyouny, a candidate who has been running a ground campaign since August.
The physician says the contrast between the political freedoms in Australia and the country he left two decades ago is not lost on him. “If I decided to run against the minister of internal affairs in Egypt, I would be in prison,” Basyouny says.
Ouf and Basyouny face a delicate balance of appealing to Muslim voters and the broader electorate. Muslim Votes does not run either of their campaigns, but it has endorsed both. The two candidates say they are fiercely secular.
“I would say I’m proudly endorsed by them, yes, but there’s a cost,” says Ouf.
“The cost is that lots of parties will not preference me over Labor. So this is an issue that I’m dealing with, but at the end of the day, it’s a game of knowledge and history. It’s about winning.”
Ouf announced on Wednesday he would preference Clare third, behind the Greens, out of six running candidates. At the bottom of the ticket, he placed Courtney Nguyen for the Liberals.
Basyouny put Burke at six and the Liberals at seven from nine candidates, with the Trumpet of Patriots ahead at No.4, and the Greens second.
When voters head to the ballot box on May 3 the calculation will be simple. Will they be better served by cabinet ministers or by independents taking the fight to Labor for the first time?
“The ultimate frustration is to have a look at what everyone else has got. But for that to change, it comes in increments,” says Dib. “The difference being at the cabinet table is that you can see problems, and you can fix it.”
Basyouny says they have already achieved part of their goal. “[We] had the minister who said he would change from the inside,” he says. “What did we get? The wrong end of the stick. Making this a marginal seat means both sides of the political spectrum will give it attention.”
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Hezbollah ‘won’t disarm’
Daily Telegraph | 20 April 2025
Beirut: Hezbollah “will not let anyone disarm” it, the Lebanese group’s leader Naim Qassem said, as Washington presses Beirut to compel the Iran-backed movement to hand over its weapons.
Hezbollah, long a dominant force in Lebanese politics, was left weakened by more than a year of hostilities with Israel sparked by the Gaza war, including an Israeli ground incursion and two months of bombardment that decimated the group’s leadership.
The fighting was largely brought to an end by a November ceasefire, but not before the group’s longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli air strike.
“We will not let anyone disarm Hezbollah or disarm the resistance” against Israel, Qassem said in remarks on a Hezbollah-affiliated TV channel.
“We must cut this idea of disarmament from the dictionary.”
Lebanese President Joseph Aoun said this week that he wanted “to make 2025 the year of restricting arms to the state”, adding he hoped to achieve that objective through “dialogue” with Hezbollah.
Qassem said his group was ready for dialogue on a “defence strategy”, “but not under the pressure of occupation” by Israel.
“Israel must withdraw (from south Lebanon) and cease its aggression, and the Lebanese state must begin the process of reconstruction,” he added.
His comments came hours after another Hezbollah official said the group refused to discuss handing over its weapons until Israel withdrew completely from south Lebanon.
“It is not a question of disarming,” Wafic Safa said in an interview with Hezbollah’s Al-Nur radio station.
Safa, believed by experts to belong to the movement’s most radical faction, said Hezbollah had conveyed its position to Aoun.
In his interview, Safa asked: “Wouldn’t it be logical for Israel to first withdraw, then release the prisoners, then cease its aggression … and then we discuss a defensive strategy?
“The defensive strategy is about thinking about how to protect Lebanon, not preparing for the party to hand over its weapons.”
Analysts have said that the once unthinkable idea of Hezbollah disarming may no longer be so, and may even be inevitable.
Under the November ceasefire, Israel was meant to withdraw all of its forces from south Lebanon.
But despite the deal, its troops have remained at five south Lebanon positions that they deem “strategic”.
Israel has also continued to carry out near-daily strikes against Lebanon – including on Friday, local time – saying it is targeting Hezbollah.
Under the truce, Hezbollah was to pull its fighters back north of Lebanon’s Litani River and dismantle any remaining military infrastructure in the south.
US special envoy for the Middle East Morgan Ortagus, who visited Beirut this month, said Washington continued to press Beirut “to fully fulfil the cessation of hostilities, and that includes disarming Hezbollah”.
It comes as the death toll from US strikes on a Yemeni fuel port rose past 80, Huthi rebels said.
Thursday’s strikes on Ras Issa aimed to cut off supplies and funds for the rebels that control large swathes of the Arabian Peninsula’s poorest country, the US military said.
Huthi media later reported fresh strikes in and around the capital Sanaa on Friday night, local time.
Huthi spokesman Anees Alasbahi said rescuers were still searching for bodies at the fuel terminal on the Red Sea, suggesting the number of dead could rise.
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We must free the Arab people from Hamas – or stop pretending we stand for freedom
Daily telegraph | Piers Akerman | 20 April 2025
In Easter and Passover rituals, millions globally celebrate and rejoice in freedom.
The Resurrection symbolised freedom through Christ, and Passover, commemorating the Exodus, the great flight from slavery to freedom. Both represent the triumph of faith over fear.
These are timeless lessons, not only for Christians and Jews but for all seeking liberation from tyranny.
Yet today, across the sands of history but in the same arid region, we find another people in bondage – not under Israel or the West’s control, but shackled by the iron grip of Hamas.
To be clear: Gaza is not “occupied” by Israel. It’s occupied by Hamas – a jihadist death cult. Those masked murderers are not freedom fighters; they are enforcers of a violent theocracy whose cruelty knows no limits and as always, their first victims are their own people.
Only recently, two brave young Gazan men dared to speak out against Hamas’s reign of terror. Their fate? Torture and death. One body was dumped like garbage outside his family home, a grotesque warning to others. This isn’t governance, it’s rule by fear, suppression, and savagery.
Hamas’s rise to power in Gaza mirrors the grotesque trajectory of another murderous ideology: the Nazis. Hitler, too, was elected – then used terror to consolidate power, silence dissent, and manipulate the masses. Tell that to the slack-jawed university students chanting Free Palestine as they wave Hamas colours in our streets, oblivious to the truth of the regime they’re glorifying.
Free Palestine? Yes – free it from Hamas. Since Hamas unleashed its barbaric October 7 attack on Israeli civilians, thousands of Palestinians have fled Gaza.
Australia granted 3000 tourist visas after negligible security checks but 7100 applications were rejected, because mixed in with the desperate are dangerous radicals who don’t seek refuge but recruitment.
Case in point: a 16-year-old in Perth, allegedly radicalised, stabbed a stranger outside a Bunnings. Another “lone wolf”? No – the wolf is real, and it’s raised in a pack. Like Usman Khan, who was given a second chance at life through a prison reform program in the UK and repaid that kindness by murdering in cold blood. Or Sudesh Amman, who barely waited days after release before stabbing two innocents.
How do you deradicalise someone taught from childhood that martyrdom is holy, that Jews are subhuman, and the West is evil? This isn’t criminality. It’s ideology.
NSW Premier Chris Minns might be a decent man, but he’s delusional if he thinks this problem can be solved with community liaisons and vague platitudes. He inherited a Labor Party terrified of offending its Muslim voter base, especially in Western Sydney where anti-Israel sentiment runs deep and the headscarves outnumber hardhats at anti-Semitic rallies.
I’ve seen this personally. Years ago, a complaint was lodged against me by Keysar Trad, right-hand man to the infamous Sheik Taj al-Din al-Hilaly – a man who compared scantily clad women to “cat’s meat”. His lawyer, Adam Houda, greeted me with “Are you a Jew?” – a phrase that would have caused a national outcry had it come from anyone else.
And what happened to Hilaly? Initially denied permanent residence on national security grounds, he was given a visa by Paul Keating’s Labor government, in a shameful act of political cowardice.
This sickness has spread. The ABC is caught up in the activist fantasy, they’ve peddled Hamas’s propaganda under the guise of “reporting”. Both the ABC and SBS refuse to call the terrorists what they are: child murderers, rapists, cowards who hide behind civilians and hospitals.
If we care about the Arabs in Gaza we must help them escape their cage by dismantling Hamas. Free Gaza from Hamas – or stop pretending you stand for freedom at all.
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