Anti-Israel demonstrators are wrong about a lot, but right about ceasefire

I write as a lawyer, as an Australian-Israeli, but  most of all as an anxious new father. For the first time since October 7, I grasped some of the heartache, as I watched another father, Yaakov Argamani kiss, hug and smell his daughter Noa who was rescued from Gaza two weeks ago after eight months of living hell.

Since October 7, hundreds and thousands of children have been physically brutalised, psychologically battered and tragically killed.  I am thinking of Ariel and Kfir Bibas aged 3 and 10 months old abducted from Kibbutz Nir Oz. Their mother Shiri was pictured holding her two red-head boys, surrounded by Hamas gunmen.

I am also thinking of 11-year-old Dareen al-Bayaa, who lost 70 family members, including her parents, in an air strike on her home in Gaza. She’s just one of thousands of Palestinian children orphaned or separated from their parents since October.

It should not be a political risk to acknowledge the reality of the October 7 massacres unequivocally. It should not be a radical act of kindness to recognise the carnage in Gaza and Palestinian trauma. In the words of the Israeli-Palestinian Bereaved families forum: “A parent who loses a child is a parent who loses a child.”  

Yet the thousands of lives lost are not the concern of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar who deliberately places innocent civilians in harms’ way. He recently described Gazan casualties as ‘necessary sacrifices.’ Palestinian lives are hardly the priority of Benjamin Netanyahu, who, with grim self-serving cynicism continues to prosecute the war for  his own political survival.