Every day since 7 October 2023 Israel has killed, on average, 92 Palestinians. It has injured and maimed countless thousands more.

It has used starvation as a weapon of war which Anthony Albanese, finally, has condemned as outrageous and completely unacceptable. Will he back up those words with meaningful action is now the burning question.

The death toll in Gaza sits at about 55,000. Hundreds more Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank by Israeli security forces or West Bank settlers intent on ethnic cleansing. What began as a war of retaliation after the shock of Hamas’s brutal 7 October attack has morphed into a war of blind revenge and obliteration, of people and of place.

We will never know the exact total or make-up of the Gaza dead. Israel’s own calculations suggest that for every Hamas fighter killed between one and three Palestinian civilians have also died – men women and children. A Times of Israel article in early May 2025 reported a study by two Australia-based academics who accused Hamas of distorting the fatality figures for woman and children as part of a propaganda campaign to highlight IDF “war atrocities”. Their study claimed the “real rate” of fatalities among women and children was only “51%”.

Netanyahu clings to the mantra of destroying Hamas. Israeli officials said last March that about 20,000 Hamas fighters had been killed. There is no doubt that Hamas’s military capacity has been seriously damaged. But the furious and indiscriminate nature of Israel’s military campaign may also have acted as a useful recruiting tool for Hamas. A recent report in Ha’aretz newspaper said the IDF’s own assessment was that, despite heavy blows, Hamas’s military wing remained operational. It had an estimated 40,000 fighters, roughly the same number as before 7 October 2023.

The Albanese Government has uttered many expressions of concern over the situation in Gaza and the West Bank. In July 2024, it imposed financial sanctions and travel bans on seven settlers involved in violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. Yet it does not appear to have sanctioned a single government individual over Israeli actions in Gaza. Now that a former Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, has described the Gaza war as one of “indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians [and that] Israel is committing war crimes” the time for timidity has truly passed.

Various actions are open to the government.

• Recall the Australian ambassador to Israel. A symbolic gesture perhaps but it would underline that there can be no business as usual until Israel changes course on Gaza. It would also hint at possible wider diplomatic isolation for Israel. Australia could work with its friends to ensure that.
• Impose financial and travel sanctions on senior members of the Israeli Government, especially Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, and National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir. Their record of promoting xenophobic racist violence is second to none. There is precedent in Australia’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which included sanctions on more than 1200 individuals and entities.
• Pause all military sales to Israel. For too long the government has spun the line that Australia does not export “weapons” to Israel. Yet Australia plays a critical role in the manufacture of the Lockheed Martin F-35 strike fighter, used in Gaza by the IDF. A Victorian Government media release in early 2023 described the F-35 as a “true embodiment of precision engineering”. What is less known, the release continued proudly, is that over 700 of the F-35’s “critical pieces are manufactured in Victoria”, a local firm playing a vital assembly role “to ensure the fighter is mission-ready, anytime and anywhere”. In July 2024, Defence Minister Richard Marles labelled the idea of Australia “somehow supplying Israel with weapons that are being used in the conflict in Gaza” as “absolutely false, a total lie”. Such absolutism was subsequently diluted to a claim that Australia was supplying only “non-lethal parts”. An irony indeed, given that the first word of a Lockheed Martin promo for the F-35 described it as “Lethal”.
• Make clear that Australia supports the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for crimes against humanity in Gaza. Foreign Minister Wong has said that Australia’s approach “will be informed by international law, not by politics”. What will that mean when it comes to action?
• Recognise a Palestinian state: an announcement on this could be made at a high-level UN meeting in mid-June 2025 being co-hosted by France and Saudi Arabia. Former foreign minister Gareth Evans said recently that by far the strongest message Australia could send would be to announce that “we are immediately recognising Palestinian statehood: not just as the final outcome of a political settlement but as a way of kick-starting it”.

On the last point, we can have no confidence that future negotiations for a two-state solution would be any more successful than discussion over the past 70 years. And prospects for peaceful talks on possible alternatives — a “one-state” solution or an unconventional “supra-state” made up of separate national or ethnic identities — seem even worse. That should not stop those of good intent, inside or outside government, from trying. This should include encouraging people-to-people contacts to counter the dehumanisation of the other, a sickening feature of the conflict.

The priority must be an unequivocal message to the Israeli Government, which Olmert recently termed a “criminal gang headed by Benjamin Netanyahu”, that it end the war, the primary goal of which now is to keep Netanyahu in power. The modern state of Israel emerged from the landscape of Nazi atrocities against those they saw as beneath them. The tragedy of today’s Israel is that some of its leaders could easily be mistaken for Nazis.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.