On Sunday, 14 December, about a thousand people were packed into Archer Park beside Bondi Beach for “Chanukah by the Sea”, a clearly Jewish event with a giant menorah, Hebrew songs, and families fenced in right next to the sand. At around 6:45 pm, two gunmen opened fire from positions around the park and along Campbell Parade, shouting “Allahu Akbar” as they poured roughly eighty rounds into the trapped Jewish crowd. Fifteen people were murdered, more than forty were wounded, and two officers were hit before police killed the father, 50-year-old Sajid Akram, and critically wounded his 24-year-old son, Naveed.
The killers are a Muslim father and son from south-west Sydney, not some mystery fringe. Sajid held a recreational hunting license with six registered firearms, which police believe were used in the attack, and travelled on an Indian passport. Naveed carried an Australian passport and had already brushed security radars in 2019 over suspected extremist leanings, then was quietly downgraded and allowed to disappear into the sprawl.
In November, they flew to the southern Philippines, landed in Davao, and checked into a cheap hotel in a region crawling with Islamist insurgents. They came and went, day after day, and no one in either country stopped them. They returned to Sydney with the same passports, the same ideology, and the same legal access to guns. Weeks later, they brought those guns to Bondi.
The motive is obviously Islamic ideology and antisemitic hate. Police, national security agencies and the prime minister all describe the attack as ISIS-inspired terrorism aimed at Jews specifically on the first night of Hanukkah.
Investigators pulled improvised ISIS flags and at least two homemade explosive devices from a car registered to Naveed and parked near the scene, and have charged him with displaying a terrorist symbol and placing an explosive near a building on top of the murder counts. Court documents state that the purpose was to advance a religious cause, intimidate the public and spread fear through violence in support of the Islamic State.
Police allege the pair “meticulously” planned the attack over months, including firearms training together at a shooting club where both were members. Naveed conducted firearms training with his father and had a delayed gun‑license process flagged in state records, now under political scrutiny. Four explosive devices were used or thrown: three pipe bombs and a “tennis ball bomb,” none of which detonated, plus additional IEDs found in their vehicle.
This is the same pattern seen in Europe and Israel, even America to some extent: Islamic ideology, Jew-hatred, mockery of Christianity, and crimes as far as rape and murder, while simultaneously playing the “victim.”
The people who died show exactly who was being hunted. Among the dead is ten-year-old Matilda, whose funeral two days ago became a symbol of what was taken in a country that bragged about gun control. The list of victims runs from that child to an eighty-seven-year-old Holocaust survivor who escaped one extermination push in Europe and died at a Hanukkah celebration in Australia. British-born Chabad rabbi Eli Schlanger was killed helping run the event, and several of the other dead and wounded are Jewish migrants who thought Sydney would be safer than London, Paris or Tel Aviv. Almost all of the victims are Jewish, because the gunmen picked a fenced Jewish event on a Jewish holy night and ignored easier, random targets around them.
During the attack, civilians did what the system likes to pretend it will do. Dashcam footage and witness accounts show Russian Jewish couple Boris and Sofia Gurman driving past, spotting an ISIS-style flag on the attackers’ vehicle, stopping and trying to pull a rifle out of Sajid’s hands; both were shot dead, but their attempt forced him to change weapons and cut into his tempo.
Ahmed Al Ahmed, a fruit shop worker, ran toward Naveed under fire, tackled him, tore the rifle away, and stood over him before dropping the gun and raising his hands. He needed surgery to survive his wounds. Bondi surf lifeguards rushed into the open with first aid kits, used boards as stretchers, and pulled about 250 people into the club building, including a pregnant woman who went into labor while shots still rang out.
There is a question that polite society will not touch. When a man like Ahmed risks his life to stop an ISIS gunman, is he acting as a Muslim who understands the history and goals of his faith, or in spite of it? How many so-called good Muslims ever ask themselves why they stay in a religion whose most devoted followers keep shooting up Jews, churches, and concerts, instead of leaving and standing with a creed that does not breed this violence again and again?
The first real line of defense was ordinary people, not the layers of “programs” and “taskforces” that took the threat less seriously when it was still online.
The police response has been under heavy scrutiny. Survivors describe around ten minutes of bursts and pauses as the gunmen fired, reloaded and fired again, while people ran for the beach, hid behind benches or lay flat on the grass. Some witnesses say officers stayed behind vehicles or other cover for too long while civilians were the ones grappling with rifles, which feeds the sense that fear of making a mistake outweighed urgency.
The New South Wales premier has appeared on TV, insisting that police advanced under fire and shot the attackers from the front, and calls criticism disrespectful to wounded officers, which shows how worried the political class is about the comparison between its own performance and the actions of people like the Gurmans and Ahmed. Former officers and security analysts point out that Bondi, with its mix of Jewish events, global profile and open space, should have had rapid armed coverage ready as soon as threats toward Jews and ISIS propaganda began spiking, not only after the blood was already on the ground.
On the legal side, the state is now doing what it should have done earlier with visas, passports and licenses. After waking from an induced coma, Naveed has been charged with fifty-nine offences: fifteen counts of murder, one count of committing a terrorist act, forty counts of wounding with intent to kill, and charges for displaying a terrorist organization’s symbol and placing explosives near a building. He appeared by video link from his hospital bed with no plea and no bail application, and his next court date is already set for 2026, but the weight of those charges is designed to keep him in a cell for life.
Fifteen victims killed, plus Sajid Akram, for a total of sixteen dead. Fourteen died at the scene, two in the hospital. Forty-two were injured and taken to the hospital.
Counterterrorism teams have raided homes around Sydney and detained at least seven men suspected of planning violence, trying to break up any network tied to the same ideology before it strikes again. The same system that gambled on this household when it mattered is now busy with paperwork and raids after the bloodshed.
For years, Islamic antisemitism, imported sectarian grudges and explicit ISIS propaganda were brushed off as “community issues” and “speech, while the immigration and citizenship machine was trained to fear accusations of bigotry more than it feared the people who actually hate the West.
Every part of the chain rewarded passivity: high intake from unstable, Islamist-heavy regions, timid vetting, reluctance to strip status, soft treatment when warnings appeared, and a refusal to police what was preached in certain mosques and online.
Bondi Beach shows where that road leads: a foreign-born father with legal guns, a son already flagged for Islamism, a trip to a jihadist region and then a clean shot at a fenced Jewish crowd on the first night of Hanukkah. Sealed borders would have stopped this ISIS filth at the gate; instead, Australia imported its own slaughter.