It was the kind of Sunday evening cherished by the Sydneysiders who call Bondi Beach home: groups of friends lolling in the sand, surfers in dripping wet suits trudging back aground, gleeful children tittering to the backdrop of soft crashing waves.
On a grassy park with a playground on one end of the beach, a well-worn tradition was underway — an annual beachside Hanukkah celebration, where hundreds of people, from toddlers to grandparents, enjoyed the first night of the festival of lights with music, face painting, a giant menorah and barbecue.
Around 6:30 p.m., a grayish hatchback pulled up nearby. Two figures dressed in dark shirts emerged. They were toting long-barrel guns and took position on an elevated footbridge overlooking the party. A series of rapid-fire pops rang out that a few recognized as gunshots. But many others thought they must be firecrackers — this being Bondi Beach and Australia, the alternative was unthinkable.
Within seconds, as the realization spread that bullets were raining on them, panic took hold. A young mother grabbed her 17-month-old baby and dove under a metal barbecue grill. Another woman shoved aside plastic chairs and pushed her 26-year-old daughter and octogenarian mother to the ground.
“It just didn’t stop,” said another woman who was at the event, who only gave her name as Pearl. “We were so targeted in that little space. We were like sitting ducks.”
Across the street, Kaitlin Davidson, a 28-year-old nurse, saw the two gunmen on the bridge directly out the window of her ground-floor apartment.
“They just kept reloading,” she said. “They had a ridiculous amount of ammunition and multiple guns.”
On Monday, the authorities said that the two gunmen had been a father-son pair, 50 and 24 years old. The police raided two homes connected to the men, but much remained unclear about how and why they carried out the worst mass shooting in Australia in nearly three decades. What was evident was that they had targeted Jews, a community already on edge because of an alarming rise in antisemitic episodes in Australia.
The younger man had been on the authorities’ radar since 2019, but there was “no indication of any ongoing threat or threat of him engaging in violence,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Monday.
By the time it was over, 14 were dead at the scene, including the older gunman. Two other victims, including a 10-year-old girl, who had been taken to hospitals died there, the police said on Monday.
The 10 or so minutes of dozens of rounds of gunfire turned the half-mile span of Bondi Beach into a scene out of a disaster movie, as droves of beachgoers, tourists and passers-by scattered and sprinted in every direction, jumping over cars and scaling concrete walls, leaving behind sandals, phones, bags and many, many colorful beach towels.
