Ahmed al-Ahmed, Syrian Australian who fought off Hanukkah attackers, recovering from surgery

The Syria-born man who tackled one of the shooters during Sunday’s Hanukkah massacre in Australia is recovering from surgery, his family and a local politician said. 

Ahmed al-Ahmed, a 43-year-old fruit vendor and father of two, was shot four or five times during the attack at Sydney’s Bondi Beach. He still has some bullets lodged inside his body, his parents, Mohamed Fateh al-Ahmed and Malakeh Hasan al-Ahmed, told the public broadcaster ABC on Monday. 

Footage of the ordeal showed Ahmed running up to one of the gunmen and wrestling his rifle away from him. He has been widely praised for his heroism, including by US President Donald Trump. Ahmed’s parents said he was in the area to have coffee with a friend when the attack occurred. 

Ahmed’s cousin, Hozay Alkanj, told ABC on Monday that Ahmed had undergone one surgery but may need more.

New South Wales Premier Chris Minns visited Ahmed in the hospital on Monday. 

Ahmed immigrated from Syria to Australia in 2006 and became an Australian citizen in 2022. His citizenship bid was previously refused in 2019 due to a charge against him for alleged possession of stolen goods. Those charges against Ahmed were dropped in 2022, and he pled guilty to minor tobacco-related offenses that year, the Sydney Morning Herald reported, citing his lawyer and court records. 

Arabic media reported that Ahmed is from the village of Al-Nayrab, located in the Idlib province in northwest Syria. 

A GoFundMe set up for Ahmed raised more than $1.4 million as of Monday evening Sydney time. Other GoFundMe pages for the victims raised hundreds of thousands of dollars. 

A total of 16 people were killed in Sunday’s attack, which targeted a gathering of Jews for the Hanukkah holiday. 

The suspects

Australian police identified the alleged perpetrators as father and son Sajid Akram, 50, and Naveed Akram, 24. The father was killed in the attack, and the son is currently in the hospital under police guard. He is expected to be charged, police said. 

ABC reported that one of the gunmen came to the attention of Australian authorities six years ago due to his ties to a Sydney-based Islamic State cell. 

Neither ISIS nor any other group has claimed credit for Sunday’s attack. 

Aftermath of the tragedy

More victims of the attack were identified on Monday, including a 10-year-old girl named Matilda Poltavchenko, and Peter Meagher, a former police officer who was covering the celebration as a photographer. 

The Jewish religious organization Chabad said on Sunday that one of their clergymen, Rabbi Eli Schlanger, was killed in the attack. 

Australia has experienced a sharp rise in antisemitism since the Gaza war began, with the Executive Council of Australian Jewry noting 2,000 incidents in the year following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack, a 316% increase from the same period 12 months earlier. 

The Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council, another Jewish communal organization, said they had been warning authorities of the violent climate in the country before Sunday’s attack. 

“We have warned for years that the unceasing antisemitic vitriol on our streets would evolve into antisemitic violence if left unchecked. We have warned that verbal abuse becomes graffiti, becomes arson, becomes physical violence, becomes murder,” the council said in a Monday statement. 

In August, Australia expelled the Iranian ambassador, accusing the Islamic Republic of being behind a string of antisemitic incidents in the country. 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday that Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s decisions have worsened the situation facing Jews in Australia, saying on X that Canberra’s recognition of a Palestinian state poured “fuel on the antisemitic fire.” 

Albanese dismissed Netanyahu’s remarks in an interview with ABC on Monday and defended the recognition, saying, “Overwhelmingly, most of the world recognizes a two-state solution as being the way forward in the Middle East.”