This article is more than 6 years old

This article is more than 6 years old

Labor heavyweight Anthony Albanese has veered off his party’s script on the conflict in Gaza, declaring the “collective punishment” being endured by the people of Gaza “completely unacceptable”.



The Labor leadership has been trying to hold a centrist position on the conflict, apportioning blame between both Israel and Hamas and calling for UN intervention to achieve a ceasefire.

But Albanese, Labor’s transport spokesman, leftwing factional leader

and one-time leadership contender, used a breakfast television appearance on Friday to point the finger squarely at Israel.

“What we saw this week, the bombing of a school where people essentially had gone to seek refuge,” he said on the Nine Network. “That is unacceptable. It is unacceptable for Hamas to fire rockets into Israel, but the collective punishment is against all the rules of engagement and Israel must stop these actions. At the moment we are seeing a child killed every hour in Gaza.”

A number of leftwing Labor MPs have departed from the careful diplomatic formulation crafted over the past 24 hours by Bill Shorten and his deputy leader, Tanya Plibersek, and signed a statement calling “on all Australian politicians to condemn the ongoing Israeli military bombardment and invasion of Gaza”.

The separate statement, also signed by a number of Greens parliamentarians and the former prime minister Malcolm Fraser, says the conflict is lopsided.

“The rockets fired from Gaza are not in any way justified and insofar as they threaten and harm civilians are illegal under international law. However, these imprecise rockets cannot be compared with the broad-scale bombing of Gaza by Israel which has one of the world’s largest military forces,” it says.

The breakaway statement is consistent with the views expressed by Albanese on Friday morning.

The differences in tone and language reflect ongoing arguments within Labor about how to position the party’s policy concerning Australia’s relationship with Israel.

Many of those internal tensions were highlighted in the recent memoir published by the former foreign minister Bob Carr, which was critical of the influence of the “Israel lobby”.

Several senior figures in the NSW branch of the ALP believe Labor needs to take a step back from an overtly pro-Israel policy. Views in the Victorian branch are quite different.

Tony Abbott, meanwhile, welcomed news of the 72-hour ceasefire in Gaza, but continued his mildly pro-Israel stance, again pointing the finger of blame at Hamas for provoking the conflict.

The prime minister had called for a ceasefire in the conflict on Thursday, arguing that too many innocent people were dying in the bombardment.

On Friday, Abbott welcomed news of the 72-hour pause in hostilities. But he was again pressed by reporters for a response to accusations that the Israelis bombed a UN school, killing more than a dozen sleeping women and children.

When asked about the school bombing by reporters on Thursday, the prime minister reasoned that the Israeli government’s decision-making was not perfect, but that it had a right to defend its borders.

Abbott delivered much the same formulation on Friday.

Asked whether he deplored actions such as the school bombing that resulted in the indiscriminate death of civilians, Abbott first blamed Hamas, saying: “I deplore the indiscriminate rain of missiles from Gaza on to Israel.”

“I deplore any actions which result in civilian deaths and obviously we’ve seen far too much of that over the last few weeks,” he said.