Opinion: Important to back Israel all the way after Hamas horrors

Amid the emotive debate over the war in Gaza it’s easy to lose sight of the critical objective of defeating Hamas, writes Andrew Wallace.

Last week I left the raucous debate and busyness of Parliament to get a first-hand look at the war raging in Israel.

I had viewed the raw footage from terrorists’ helmet cameras before I’d left. I’d seen the evidence of the worst forms of barbarity that a human being can suffer at the hands of another.

But the sights, sounds and smells will never be forgotten.

The roar of fighter jets and Apache gunships overhead and the reverberations of nearby 155mm artillery were a stark reminder of the Israeli Defence Force’s commitment to destroy Hamas and the evil it continues to wage.

The attacks on Kfar Aza and other towns and kibbutz like them weren’t attacks on military targets.

Hamas terrorists murdered ordinary mums, dads, kids, and babies early on that Saturday morning of October 7 with a barbarity that beggars belief. The attacks were well orchestrated for maximum effect, in multiple places by as many as 3000 terrorists going door to door, with automatic weapons, grenades and rocket-propelled grenades. Almost every house I saw bore the scars of the attacks, with windows and doors shot out and large sections of rendered brick facade lying in rubble, reminiscent of scenes of occupied France in WWII.

A few kilometres down the road Hamas militants invaded the town of Sderot, which is just 1.5km from the Gaza border.

In Sderot, Hamas murdered nearly 20 police officers at the local station and butchered civilians on the streets. One woman told me how she cradled her young daughter on the floor of their bomb shelter for 10 hours, until the IDF found them. Fear of continued attacks has driven 90 per cent of the nearly 37,000 residents of Sderot from their homes, and hundreds of thousands in the south and north have similarly been evacuated to overcrowded emergency accommodation in relatively “safer” towns and cities.

It’s Israel’s young soldiers who responded in the early hours of October 7. Outmanned, outgunned and without clear direction from their superiors, young Israeli reservists drove toward the gunfire armed with little more than their service side-arm, social media and their mobile phone to co-ordinate their movements between them.

Andrew Wallace (LNP, second from left) with (from left) an IDF soldier, Joel Burnie (Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council), Michelle Ananda-Rajah (ALP), Zoe McKenzie (Lib), Simon Birmingham (Lib), David Fawcett (Lib) and Josh Burns (ALP).

These young reservists slowed the advance of Hamas until the IDF were able to mobilise their regular forces, which unbelievably took many hours.

These were young people like 19-year-old soldier Roni Eshel, whose unit first reported the breaches and resultant attacks. It took five weeks to identify her body because of the terrorists’ use of incendiary weapons.

Her colleagues were either shot on site or kidnapped, only to be raped, tortured, and executed, some in the El Shifa Hospital in Gaza.

Every drop of civilian blood is on the hands of Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and their allies.

Yet the response, from the UN to the schools and streets of Australia, would have you believe otherwise.

Even in my community, misinformed protesters have called for fighting to end, blaming Israel for the lives lost. Some use vile antisemitic slurs like “from the river to the sea” alongside “always was, always will be”, with no sense of the hurt caused or the irony. They’ve plastered social media and streetsides with both Nazi symbols and ceasefire demands.

Ask yourself who celebrated the attacks on October 7: Iran, Islamic extremists, white supremacists, Russia. Are these the beacons of tolerance and peace among which social justice activists really want to associate themselves?

Protesters fail to recognise that this war was started by Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran on October 7. A ceasefire now only helps Hamas and Hezbollah to regroup.

Protesters call for a proportionate response. What is proportionate? Should Israel pick 1200 men, women and children to murder, rape and torture? Should the IDF abduct 250 Palestinians?

The only reasonable response to this evil attack is to dismantle the terror network which has for so long threatened Israel’s right to exist.

Up until this week, Australia has backed Israel’s right to defend itself. Yet Prime Minister Anthony Albanese decided to break with decades of bipartisanship and support calls for a ceasefire at the UN.

In doing so, his government has sided with those who want to see Israel annihilated – abandoning our only democratic partner in the Middle East.

Andrew Wallace, a Sunshine Coast-based federal MP, is deputy chair of the parliamentary joint committee on intelligence and security

Originally published as Opinion: Important to back Israel all the way after Hamas horrors