Don’t be ‘suckered’ by Gaza ceasefire call: Scott Morrison

Former prime minister Scott Morrison has rejected calls for a ceasefire in Gaza while touring one of the places in Israel hit hardest by the October 7 massacre, saying the international community should not be fooled by Hamas’ attempt to use a pause in hostilities to prepare for further attacks.

Morrison and former British prime minister Boris Johnson visited the Kfar Aza kibbutz in southern Israel on Monday, where around 57 people were believed to have been killed and 17 taken hostage after Hamas terrorists streamed across the Gaza border.

Scott Morrison visits the Kfar Azza kibbutz on Sunday.Credit: Ariel Schalit

Johnson said during the visit that protesters marching in “free Palestine” rallies across the world were condoning Hamas’ atrocities and it was not other nations’ business to tell Israel how to defend itself.

“I don’t support a ceasefire,” Morrison told Channel Nine while visiting the site, which is less than three kilometres from the Gaza border.

“A ceasefire would simply advantage Hamas to be able to strengthen their positions and make this war go on for even longer.

“Do you provide a pause and a ceasefire to allow Hamas to regroup, to get themselves in a position to resist even further? I mean this is the play from Hamas, and we’ve got to be careful not to be suckered into it.”

Morrison said any visitor would feel overwhelmed by the enormity of what occurred at Kfar Aza on October 7, describing it as a place of innocence that “now has been desecrated beyond comprehension”.

Bullet holes and blood stains are still visible on the walls of the homes in the kibbutz weeks after the attack, with clothes and other personal belongings strewn across its streets.

Johnson said that “since that appalling massacre of October 7, you’re seeing a kind of fog descend, a moral fog, and I just want to remind people of the absolute barbarism of what took place and to make it clear that Israel has the right to defend itself”.

Asked about the massive pro-Palestine rallies that have broken out since the massacres and the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza, Johnson told Israel’s Channel 12: “I would say to everybody marching across the world right now, supposedly in support of ‘free Palestine,’ in fact what they are doing, whether they intend it or not, is condoning the brutality and the murder that was conducted by those Hamas terrorists, and which, by the way, they would do again”.

Destroyed vehicles in the Israeli kibbutz of Kfar Aza, which was attacked by Hamas on October 7.Credit: Kate Geraghty

Rejecting calls for a ceasefire, Johnson said, “When you have a crime on this scale, and when there’s the possibility of it happening again, I don’t think it’s the business of the world to tell Israel to stop”.

People should absolutely “be under no illusions about the savagery, the sadism, the lack of humanity of [the] Hamas terrorists”, he said.

Greens senators walked out of question time on Monday over the government’s refusal to back a ceasefire, with Senator Mehreen Faruqi calling “free, free Palestine” and raising her fist in the air.

David Rich, a research fellow at the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, said incidents of antisemitism had exploded worldwide following the Hamas attacks and Jews were being attacked as a proxy for the state of Israel.

“I think we shouldn’t underestimate the amount of denial that there is out there about what Hamas actually did on the seventh of October,” said Rich, who is visiting Australia for a trip organised by the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies.

“More broadly, a lot of the language of the anti-Israel protests revolves around denial of Israel’s right to exist – the idea that the way to resolve the conflict is for Israel to just disappear.

“I think there’s a lack of understanding of just how hurtful and harmful that rhetoric actually is and the impact that has on the Jewish community.”

Rich said he had “very little patience” for pro-Palestine protesters who chanted slogans such as “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”.

“We know what Hamas means by that phrase,” he said.

Hamas’s 2017 constitution says that it “rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea”, which is widely understood to refer to the elimination of the state of Israel.

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