As politicians exchanged fiery arguments about the Israel-Gaza war, Palestinian Australians fronted the media in the heart of Parliament House with a plea to be heard above the noise.
“The people of Gaza are not just headlines. They are not just numbers. They are precious lives,” said Dr Bushra Othman, a Melbourne surgeon who recently returned from a volunteering stint at al-Aqsa hospital in Gaza.
Speaking to reporters in parliament’s Mural Hall on Tuesday, Othman recalled a 21-year-old patient “who died because of severe malnutrition and devastating injuries she suffered from a bomb while walking home”.
Othman also mentioned a 17-year-old patient “whose right arm has been auto-amputated by shrapnel, and his mangled right leg is on the brink of being amputated”.
“We travelled to Gaza to provide medical care, but it became clear that our main role was to bear witness to the cruel injustice, to the oppression and the horrific crimes being committed against the Palestinians there.”
Tamara Asmar, who has family roots in the West Bank city of Nablus, also implored the government, media and the public to see Palestinians as more than “just numbers”.
Asmar told the “heartbreaking story of my friend, Mahmoud, just one of many Palestinian families currently trapped in Gaza”.
In a letter read out by Asmar, Mahmoud said he and his wife Hadeel “have the two most beautiful children in this world”, Muhammad, 3, and Adam, 2.
Mahmoud wrote that the family’s home in al-Shati in Gaza City “was our sanctuary” but their world was shattered when Israeli bombs hit the mosque next to their house.
“Our houses collapsed and we were buried under the rubble. They pulled us from the debris, injured and disorientated. My big brother, Jamal, and his granddaughter, Farah, were killed that day, their lives cut cruelly short,” Mahmoud wrote.
“The rest of us were left with wounds that went beyond the visible. Everyone knew how much Jamal loved his family, and innocent Farah with a constant smile was the light of our lives. That night, I lost a part of my heart.”
Mahmoud described how his family had “fled seven times, including to a shelter in Khan Younis and tents in Rafah” and “escaped death” multiple times. Blockaded Gaza had become “a graveyard for our dreams and hopes”.
Asmar added her own request: “Think of Adam and Muhammad tonight, when you tuck your own children up in bed knowing that they will be safe purely by virtue of luck and geography.”
The deputy leader of the Greens, Mehreen Faruqi, and the independent senators Lidia Thorpe and Fatima Payman joined the press conference. “The hard truth is that both the old parties – Labor and the Liberals – pick and choose who they see as victims,” Faruqi said.
Over in the House of Representatives, most of the media’s attention was on Peter Dutton’s condemnation of Anthony Albanese for including calls for deescalation and a ceasefire in Gaza and Lebanon in a wide-ranging motion to mark the first anniversary of the Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel on 7 October.
But in a more inclusive portion of the parliamentary debate, the Labor MP Josh Burns sought to project a message of “shared humanity”.
Burns began by saying he and the Jewish community were haunted by the images of the Hamas attacks, resulting in “the largest loss of Jewish life, of our people, since the 1940s”.
“I think about when we went to Sderot, a town [close to Gaza] commonly known as one of the most bombarded towns in the world,” Burns recalled, noting the very short amount of time Israelis had to take shelter when sirens warned of rockets from Gaza.
“I saw the CCTV footage of a father holding his daughter in his arms, leaving a car, running for safety for those 10 to 15 seconds. He was killed in cold daylight.”
Burns went on to acknowledge the “anxiety and pain” of his friends in the Palestinian and Lebanese communities who would be feeling “the same sense of loss and devastation that my own community feels”. He said the most important lesson was not to “scream the loudest” but to strive jointly for peace and dignity.
“I say this as a proud Jewish Australian: the Palestinian people and the Lebanese people are not my enemies. We are all people. We all must think about the future that we need to build together.”