The crooked line between Gaza and Bondi

The 14 December 2025 attack at Bondi Beach, where a father-son pair opened fire on a Hanukkah celebration, killing 15 people and injuring dozens, has been formally described by Australian authorities as an Islamic State-inspired antisemitic terrorist act.

The horror is obvious and the condemnation must be absolute. The harder question is analytical: how should we understand the relationship between this attack and the Gaza war without either erasing the gunmen’s agency or ignoring the domestic repercussions of Israeli military conduct? Police say Sajid Akram, 50, and his son Naveed, 24, fired on a crowd of several hundred before Sajid was shot dead and Naveed arrested. Six legally licensed firearms registered to Sajid were recovered, along with improvised explosive devices and Islamic State flags.

What happened at Bondi was exactly the kind of scenario that had been haunting Canberra for months. In an earlier interview aboard his Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) 737, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese reflected on growing antisemitic incidents linked to the Gaza war and stressed that Australia “doesn’t have a direct role in the Middle East,” “doesn’t supply weapons,” and that Australians “don’t want conflict brought here.” That hope collapsed on 14 December, when a distant war materialised on Bondi Beach in the form of an attack on a Jewish community celebration.

Twin Repercussions: Antisemitism and Islamophobia

By the time of the attack, Australia was already in what the federal special envoy for combating antisemitism called a national antisemitism crisis. In the 12 months after October 2023, more than 2,000 antisemitic incidents were logged, roughly a fivefold increase on previous years, including arson, vandalism of synagogues and schools, threats, and harassment. Australian intelligence publicly linked at least two arson attacks against Jewish targets to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, prompting the expulsion of Iran’s ambassador and terrorist listing of the IRGC. The Gaza war has therefore created a permissive environment in which transnational jihadists and hostile states can more easily operate under the cover of a broader wave of hate.

The same conflict has, in parallel, intensified Islamophobia. The fifth Islamophobia in Australia report, based on more than 600 verified incidents collected by the Islamophobia Register and analysed by Monash and Deakin researchers, finds that Islamophobic incidents more than doubled between January 2023 and late 2024, with a sharp spike after October 2023. Most in-person victims are Muslim women and girls, especially those wearing hijab.  The majority report anxiety, social withdrawal and a lasting sense of being unsafe in public. A federal policy paper on Islamophobia bluntly concludes that anti-Muslim hostility is now “more prevalent than ever” and explicitly links recent surges to the Israel – Gaza war.

In other words, Gaza has generated twin repercussion fields in Australia: one of heightened antisemitism, another of heightened Islamophobia. Jews are read as symbolic stand-ins for Israel; Muslims are read as stand-ins for Hamas or “terrorism.” Both communities are exposed to risk by the same conflict.

IS Ideology, Gaza, and the Logic of Externalities

A simple “Gaza caused Bondi” story flattens the causality. The evidence points to something more layered: a pre-existing Islamic State trajectory that later intersected with, and was sharpened by, the polarisation around Gaza. Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) first questioned Naveed Akram in 2019 over ties to an Islamic State-linked cell, before assessing him as no longer an immediate threat. In November 2025, he and his father travelled to the southern Philippines, a long-standing hub for IS-aligned militants, where they reportedly undertook “military-style training” before returning to Sydney. Police say the pair pledged allegiance to Islamic State shortly before the shooting

This is the trajectory of Islamic State radicalisation, not of two men conjured from thin air by a single war. IS has its own antisemitic project, rooted in an apocalyptic jihadist worldview, which is distinct from Palestinian nationalism or pro-Palestinian activism.

Gaza matters at a different level. Since October 2023, Israeli military operations have killed tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, estimated at around 50,000 – 55,000 by local health authorities and UN-linked humanitarian assessments, and devastated civilian infrastructure, with parts of the territory pushed into famine conditions. These images circulate globally. They fuel deep moral outrage, accusations of double standards, and a sense among many Muslims that Palestinian lives count for less.

Terrorism research usually separates three layers of causation: root causes, enabling conditions and proximate triggers. Applied to Bondi, the Akrams’ immersion in Islamic State ideology is the root cause of their turn to violence. The sharp rise in antisemitic incidents function as enabling conditions, making Jewish communal spaces more visible, more securitised and more readily imagined as “on the front line.” Gaza’s devastation, and the symbolic visibility of a Hanukkah event, then operate as proximate triggers: to determine when and whom the attackers targeted, not who they were in the first place.

Bondi is therefore best understood as Islamic State – inspired antisemitic terrorism exploiting repercussion fields created by the Gaza war. The conflict in Gaza did not create Islamic State in Sydney, but it reshaped the informational and emotional terrain in which pre-radicalised actors made operational decisions; a configuration of causes, not a straight line.

The Netanyahu Trap: What Australia Should Learn

This distinction matters because it cuts against what might be called the Netanyahu trap. In the aftermath of the attack, Israel’s prime minister claimed that the Australian government had “let the disease” of antisemitism spread, directly blaming the Bondi shootings to Canberra’s recognition of Palestinian statehood.

Israeli peace activist Yariv Oppenheimer has warned that the Israeli government must not “take advantage of this horrible event” to silence criticism of its Gaza policy, arguing that using the massacre as a shield against scrutiny would deepen, rather than resolve, the crisis. Albanese has refused that conflation. He has insisted that an attack on Jewish Australians is an attack on all Australians, while reaffirming support for a two-state solution and moving to strengthen protections against both antisemitism and Islamophobia. Muslim organisations and Palestinian advocacy groups, including the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network, have likewise condemned the attack without qualification, drawing a clear line between their activism and IS-inspired violence

If Bondi is treated only as a story about “imported hatred,” Australia will miss what it reveals about its own political choices. The Gaza war is not something that happens on a distant screen and then stops at the water’s edge; it reshapes how Australian Jews and Muslims see one another, how safe they feel in public space, and how easily extremists can step in.

Responding to that reality means more than tightening gun laws or adding extra patrols. It also requires a political vocabulary that can keep two ideas in view at the same time: that Israeli policy in Gaza is generating real security externalities for Australians, and that those externalities can never excuse, legitimise or be used to silence criticism of violence against civilians on either side. Remembering Bondi in those terms, through the choices of a man like Ahmed al Ahmed, who tried to intervene in the shooting, as much as through the actions of the attackers, is the only way to stop this kind of repercussion from becoming the new normal.