We, the Zion­ist Fed­er­a­tion of Aus­tralia (ZFA) and the Exec­u­tive Coun­cil of Aus­tralian Jew­ry (ECAJ), are high­ly con­cerned by the com­ments made by For­eign Min­is­ter Pen­ny Wong on ABC Insid­ers this morn­ing.

The For­eign Min­is­ter stat­ed that “we all want to take the next steps towards a cease­fire,” while not­ing that no cease­fire could be “one-sided.”

But unless and until Hamas is removed from pow­er, a cease­fire will inevitably fur­ther endan­ger Israel.

Hamas lead­ers have pub­licly stat­ed that Hamas will con­tin­ue to repeat its 7 Octo­ber mas­sacres until Israel is even­tu­al­ly anni­hi­lat­ed. Hamas being in pow­er in Gaza is an intol­er­a­ble threat to Israel, as world lead­ers – includ­ing in Aus­tralia – recog­nised in the wake of 7 Octo­ber.

Any cease­fire that does not involve the return of the hostages and the removal of Hamas from pow­er will only entrench Hamas and embold­en Israel’s oth­er geno­ci­dal ene­mies, like Hezbol­lah. It will guar­an­tee more war and human suf­fer­ing for all.

In addi­tion, we refer to the Minister’s asser­tion that the hos­pi­tals and med­ical facil­i­ties that Hamas bur­rows itself into are pro­tect­ed under inter­na­tion­al law and her call for Israel to “cease the attack­ing of hos­pi­tals.”

We remind the Gov­ern­ment that Arti­cle 19 of the Gene­va Con­ven­tion explic­it­ly states that hos­pi­tals lose their pro­tec­tion if they are used for mil­i­tary pur­pos­es. It is incon­tro­vert­ible that Hamas uses Shi­fa and oth­er hos­pi­tals for mil­i­tary pur­pos­es. There is no evi­dence that Israel is not observ­ing the laws of armed con­flict.

The libel that any Israeli attack on Gazan hos­pi­tals from which Hamas oper­ates would amount to war crimes only serve to demonise the state of Israel and its sup­port­ers. These libels are cen­tral to Hamas’ objec­tives as a ter­ror­ist organ­i­sa­tion, and are rever­ber­at­ing across the world in a new wave of anti­semitism.

The Gov­ern­ment of Aus­tralia should not be lend­ing any cred­i­bil­i­ty to this false and harm­ful nar­ra­tive. Instead, it should unequiv­o­cal­ly state that Hamas is moral­ly and legal respon­si­ble for the suf­fer­ing of civil­ians in Gaza as a result of start­ing this war and its dozens of war crimes that pur­pose­ful­ly endan­ger Pales­tin­ian civil­ians for tac­ti­cal and pro­pa­gan­da advan­tage.