Terror groups responsible as war spreads to Lebanon

Social media was awash with outrage on Thursday over the deaths in Lebanon of two Australian men and the wife of one of them in a reported Israeli airstrike. But one of the dead, Ali Bazzi, was buried by the Hezbollah terrorist organisation, which claimed him as a martyr. There is nothing to indicate the others – his Sydney resident brother, Ibrahim, was in Lebanon to bring his wife, Shourouk Hammoud, to Australia – were combatants. However, they died in a border town, a battleground in previous wars, in a region now used by terrorists to attack Israel, in support of their Hamas comrades in Gaza. Their deaths demonstrate, yet again, the horrors that Hamas unleashed with its invasion of Israel on October 7, murdering and taking hostage as many ordinary Israelis as it could.

Unless Hamas was so deluded as to think Israel would not fight back, the goal can only have been to bring on a full-scale war, with civilians on both sides inevitably in the firing line. And now, for as long as Hezbollah continues to attack Israel from Lebanon, there is a very real risk that many more non-combatants, including Australians, will die there. There are 15,000 Australians living in Lebanon, and many more of the 250,000 Australians with Lebanese ancestry visit. It is time for all of them who can to come home. As Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus put it on Thursday, “the government urges any Australians who are still in Lebanon to leave while commercial options are still available”.

Mr Dreyfus also had a stark warning for any Australians who consider the cause of Hezbollah their own, if only because any enemy of Israel is their friend. “Hezbollah is a listed terrorist organisation under Australian law, it is an offence for any Australian to co-operate with, to support, let alone to fight with (it),” he said. There are good reasons for this. For a start, Hezbollah, like Hamas, is funded by Iran, both to destroy Israel or, second-best, undermine the process for peace throughout the Middle East. And the two organisations are a real and present danger to some Australians, like the children of men who took their families with them when they went to fight for the Islamic State terrorist group and who languished for years in refugee camps when ISIS’s attempt at a theocracy in Syria and Iraq was defeated.

The prospect of Australians travelling to the Middle East to enlist in armies of terror cannot be accepted. Nor can the possibility of zealots deciding to use mass murder here be discounted. Fears of a domestic terror threat have diminished over the past decade, but converts to the cause of Hamas and Hezbollah could change that. Above all, the government needs to repeat, repeat, repeat that Hezbollah is a terrorist organisation, that its ways are not acceptable in Australia. For those mourning Ibrahim Bazzi and Shourouk Hammoud, this will be no comfort – they have lost people they loved in a war they were not fighting. But the default position of Israel’s enemies, that this is yet another example of its responsibility for every death in Gaza and on its northern border, must not stand.

This is especially so now it appears that Hezbollah is under pressure from Iran to up its attacks on Israel. Israel is unlikely to back off and is signalling that it will fight on its Lebanon front. It has already killed Iranian general Razi Moussavi in an airstrike in Syria and announced Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader in Lebanon, is a target. This makes for difficult and contested ground for Australians with families and heritage in the Middle East. But it is ground where the Albanese government must take a stand and not move, however unpopular this is in some Labor and Greens seats in the House of Representatives. Mr Dreyfus did well to remind all Australians that Hezbollah is a terrorist organisation. The chant, “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, sums up its intent – to destroy the world’s only Jewish nation. The October 7 pogrom in Israel demonstrated how the terrorists intend to do it.