Feelings of frustration and anger were palpable among the thousands of people who attended pro-Palestine rallies around Australia on Sunday, decrying the rising number of civilian deaths as the war in Gaza approaches 12 months.
Protesters took to the streets in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, a day before the first anniversary of the 7 October attacks by Hamas in southern Israel.
In Sydney, speakers took aim at Australia’s leaders – including the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, and foreign minister, Penny Wong – and the media, with shouts of “shame” ringing out and a sense of frustration that their calls for action were not being heeded.
Ellen Vera travelled from Casula to attend the weekly rally for the first time, and said she was walking “for the children, the women and the men who cannot get treatment because the hospitals are all blown up”.
Sitting beside her was Rafah Chalab, a Palestinian woman who has been attending the rallies since they begun – and never expected to still be marching nearly a year later.
“I’m sick and tired of the complicity of this government,” she said, saying her community feels “perpetually sad”.
“We just want peace, and we want Australia to put pressure on Israel … any small gesture would go a long way to improving the wellbeing of our community and to justice,” she said.
While police in New South Wales had sought to block the Sunday rally from taking place, an agreement reached with organisers allowed the event to go ahead with an altered route.
NSW police assistant commissioner, Peter McKenna, said the roughly 10,000 people involved in Sunday’s rally were “very compliant with police directions overall” and police had not received any reports of people being harmed.
The Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi was spotted in the crowd in Sydney, while federal independent senator Lidia Thorpe spoke at the Melbourne rally.
Kamila, who did not wish to share her last name, has been attending the rallies since December and said she feels it is her “duty as a human being” and someone living in Australia from another country – New Zealand – to “speak up and give a voice to those that don’t have a voice”.
“It’s about humanity, and I think as humanity – as a collective humanity – I think we’ve failed, and that’s why I’m here today,” she said.
Cherish Kuehlmann, a UNSW student with the Students for Palestine group, also began attending the rallies one year ago and said it had grown into “one of the biggest anti-war movements” in Australian history, describing what is occurring in the Middle East as the “moral crime of our generation”.
In Melbourne, pro-Palestine crowds swelled to thousands across the CBD, where people rallied outside the state library.
The Australian Palestine Advocacy Network president, Nasser Mashni, told the crowd that Israel should be condemned for its retaliation, which has reverberated across Gaza and the Middle East.
“Will anyone speak of the dead children, dead women and dead men?” Mashni said as protesters prepared to march from the library to Flinders Street Station.
The crowd was also led in a chant of “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”.
The phrase has been the subject of controversy, with some saying that it advocates the eradication of Israel. Others, including Western Australian senator Fatima Payman, have argued that it is not antisemitic.
Earlier on Sunday, asked what would happen if any Hezbollah flags were present at the Sydney rally, the NSW police assistant commissioner said organisers had agreed no flags or portraits would be displayed.
McKenna said if anyone was found doing so “and are committing an offence, action will be taken”.
Asked if it was against legislation to display a portrait of slain Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, McKenna said “no it’s not”, but “there is a view in certain circumstances it could be seen as offensive, and we will consider that throughout the operation”.
In Hyde Park, police had placed two large LED screens telling people not to fly Hezbollah flags or imagery with slain leader Hassan Nasrallah.
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Prior to the rallies, the deputy prime minister, Richard Marles, said the timing of the protests should have been different.
“The protests that are happening over the course of today and tomorrow are deeply regrettable,” he told ABC’s Insiders program on Sunday.
“The anniversary of October 7 needs to be about October 7, and what happened on that day was the loss of more than 1,000 innocent lives.
“It’s the anniversary of that that we will be remembering today and tomorrow.”
The NSW premier, Chris Minns, said while he supported the right for people to protest in public, the demonstration should not have been organised near the anniversary.
“My view is that it lacks compassion to hold a rally or a demonstration or a protest on that day,” he told Sky News.
“We’ve got an obligation to keep the public safe in a difficult time, and when tensions are high, there’s a high prospect of clashes or violence on Sydney streets.
“Most people would agree that we’re not going to do much about Middle Eastern violence from Sydney, and we have to do everything we possibly can to prevent that kind of violence in Sydney.”
The opposition home affairs spokesperson, James Paterson, said the federal government should have made a bigger effort to persuade community leaders not to have the protest.
“[Anthony Albanese] should have gone direct to community leaders and used the relationships and the status of the office of prime minister that he holds to say ‘this is unacceptable and it must not proceed’,” he told Sky News.
“We’re not saying that you can’t protest the Palestinian cause, we’re just saying pick any other day of the year than October 7.”
Labor MP Josh Burns said there was no way for the federal government to intervene with the pro-Palestine rallies.
He said Jewish Australians needed to be allowed to grieve on the anniversary.
“I don’t think that the message of protesting on October 7 does anything else other than really make people who are grieving feel even more upset and more uncomfortable,” he told Sky News.
More than 1,200 people were killed on the 7 October attack and 250 were taken hostage, according to the Israeli government.
In response, Israel unleashed a bombing campaign and ground invasion of Gaza, killing almost 42,000 people, displacing 1.9 million and leaving another 500,000 with catastrophic levels of food insecurity, local health ministry sources report.
Israel’s military campaign has now spread to Lebanon as it hunts down senior figures in Hezbollah, a Lebanese militant group backed by Iran and designated a terrorist organisation by Australia.
With reporting by Australian Associated Press
