Tony Burke says people have right to grieve Gaza deaths and backs flying Palestinian flag in Australia

Albanese government minister Tony Burke has backed a Sydney council’s decision to raise the Palestinian flag until a ceasefire is declared in the Israel-Gaza conflict, saying people had a right to grieve what they saw happening to Palestinians.

Burke, one of the most senior members of the Labor government, represents an electorate with one of the biggest Muslim communities in Australia. In an interview with ABC radio RN Breakfast, Burke said the council was truly “representing grief in that community”.

“It is not the Hamas flag … it’s a Palestinian flag. And it’s a flag that gives people the chance to know that there is recognition and not selective grief,” Burke said.

“We can’t say we only grieve for certain people who are slaughtered. We can’t have a situation as a nation where we only formally acknowledge particular deaths. I’m really glad that the council made that decision. I’m very proud that it was my local council.”

At a high-level national security briefing on Friday, it was revealed that the domestic terrorism threat level remained unchanged at “possible” because extremist groups were watching the events in the Middle East but were not known to be advocating or planning violence in Australia.

The government is working with other countries to try to prevent a broader regional war, with concerns that any spillover of the conflict to Lebanon could resonate more strongly here.

The Gaza health ministry has reported at least 7,000 deaths since Israeli airstrikes began on 7 October, many of them women and children.

Israel’s ambassador to Australia, Amir Maimon, urged the world not to “look away” from the atrocities committed by Hamas on 7 October, in which more than 1,400 people were killed and about 220 others were taken hostage. Israel has vowed to “eliminate” Hamas.

Burke backed in Penny Wong’s most recent statement on the situation, which called for a “humanitarian pause” not a ceasefire, pointing out the line “where she said the way Israel defends itself, matters”.

“If you go back to the first days after October 7, when the Israeli defence minister referred to a complete siege, he used the term ‘human animals’. And he said there would be no food, no water, and no fuel into Gaza,” Burke said.

“Now in my part of Sydney, people are not simply getting their information through the media. They’re getting information directly from the ground in Gaza. It’s coming through WhatsApp groups, people are getting updates people are seeing horrific images updated every hour on their phones.”

Burke said everyone condemned the deadly attack Hamas launched against Israel on 7 October and grieving Palestinian lives lost did not weaken that condemnation.

“There’s a really immature debate that we often fall into where it says if you acknowledge anything in favour of the Palestinian people, or a claim that if in any way you acknowledge that there is a history that began before October 7, that somehow that’s making excuses for Hamas, it’s not.

“It’s simply the case that people have a right to be able to grieve when innocent life is lost. And the concept of competitive grief, which certainly hasn’t, hasn’t driven any of the interviews on this program, but has driven some of the media, is something that I don’t want to see in Australia.”

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Burke said the humanitarian situation on the ground in Gaza was rapidly getting worse with limited supplies of medicines, clean water and fuel to run essential services.

Burke said he did not want to “get into the debate” about the use of the apartheid label – which Israel firmly disputes – but noted that archbishop Desmond Tutu had used the term. Burke said he had visited military courts in the West Bank “where Palestinians are tried within the order of a 99% reported conviction rate”.

“If two children throw a stone at a member of the Israeli Defence Force – one is Jewish, one is Palestinian – the legal consequences of that identical action or different depending on their race,” Burke said.

“Now, people can reach their own conclusions about what word to apply to that. But that’s how the law works there at the moment.”

Burke said people needed to stop conflating Palestinians and Hamas – something he said had happened on “too many occasions” already as “the military conflict is meant to be against Hamas”.

Burke’s comments are the strongest from an Albanese minister on the conflict since Ed Husic said he believed what was happening to Palestinians was collective punishment.

Wong has previously acknowledged “widespread suffering” of civilians in Gaza but has stopped short of saying Israel’s siege amounted to collective punishment.