Anti-Israel protesters took to the streets of Sydney, Australia over the weekend to condemn the assassinations of Hezbollah leader Fuad Shukr and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.
Images posted to social media showed demonstrators holding photographs of Haniyeh, who was killed in Tehran last week. Protesters also carried Palestinian flags and unfurled a large watermelon flag that spanned the width of the street.
Last week, anti-Israel protesters in New York City's Times Square also held up portraits of the Hamas leader Haniyeh during a demonstration.
Haniyeh, who was killed while in Tehran to attend the inauguration of the new Iranian President, Masoud Pezeshkian, lived in Qatar in the lap of luxury. On October 7, when news of the massacre Hamas carried out in sourthern Israel reached him, Haniyeh was filmed offering a prayer in thanksgiving for the Jewish blood that was spilled.
Fuad Shukr was eliminated in an Israeli airstrike in Beirut hours before Haniyeh's assassination. Shukr was Hezbollah's most senior military commander and the head of its Strategic Unit, and was responsible for the Majdal Shams massacre on July 27 in which 12 Druze children were murdered in a Hezbollah rocket attack on the Golan Heights.
Shukr was also responsible for the 1983 bombing in which 241 American servicemen were murdered and had a $5 million bounty on his head from the US government.
Sydney has been the site of other anti-Israel and pro-Hamas protests. In the immediate aftermath of the October 7 massacre, the Free Palestine movement held a torch-lit rally outside the Sydney Opera House in Sydney celebrating the massacre.
During the October rally, potesters threw flares at the iconic building and chanted “f..k Israel” and “f..k the Jews" and "gas the Jews!" An Israeli flag was burned on the Opera House steps.
Police later claimed that the protesters shouted "where's the Jews?" and not "gas the Jews!"
In November, a Jewish man said that he was beaten by three anti-Israel activists in Sydney. The victim told Sky News that he was "lucky to be alive" following the beating.