What We Know About the Bondi Beach Shooting in Australia

Two gunmen opened fire at dozens of people who were at a Jewish holiday event. At least 15 people were killed in the attack, and so was one of the shooters, the police said.

At least 15 people were killed on Sunday and dozens more were injured after two gunmen opened fire at a crowd celebrating the first day of the Hanukkah holiday on Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia. The gunmen were father and son, the police said, and the older man died during the attack.

On Monday morning in Australia, officials said 40 people were hospitalized from injuries. Two police officers were also hurt in the attack, officials said. The police said the second shooter had also been wounded.

The police and the country’s leaders called the shootings a targeted attack on Jewish Australians. Law enforcement officials called the shooting a terrorist attack.

Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon said the police had found and disabled two improvised explosives devices in a nearby vehicle that is linked to the suspect who was killed. The suspects’ names have not been released yet.

One witness video shows dozens of people running out of the water and away from the beach as gunshots rang out. Another, verified by The New York Times, shows a bystander — who local authorities called a hero — tackling and disarming one of the gunmen.

Jewish people have increasingly been targeted since the Hamas-led attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. In Britain, a man attacked a synagogue in Manchester on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year for Jews. And American Jews have faced a year of violence.

Here is what we know so far about the Australia shooting:

Hundreds had gathered to mark the Jewish holiday.

The mass shooting happened around 6:45 p.m. at Bondi Beach, one of Sydney’s most popular tourist destinations that stretches over 3,000 feet long and draws hundreds of thousands of people each year.

An event hosted by the Chabad organization was taking place at the beach to celebrate the first day of the Jewish holiday Hanukkah when the gunmen opened fire.

“An attack on Jewish Australians is an attack on every Australian,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia said in a televised address.

Witnesses said they heard many gunshots.

Ebonny Munro was at the beach with her 17-month-old baby when she heard gunshots. She dived under a metal barbecue with another man. She said she heard bullets ricocheting off the barbecue and smelled gunpowder from above.

She said the shooting lasted around 10 minutes and she witnessed at least one person being shot. “I was about to leave, and I just heard this pop,” Ms. Munro said.

Finn Foster, 18, a backpacker from Canada, said he and his girlfriend had been headed to McDonald’s to get ice cream when they heard what sounded like fireworks.

“Pow, pow, pow,” he said. “Like 15 or 20.”

Mass shootings are rare in Australia.

Mass shootings are rare in Australia because of the country’s strict gun laws. The nation has one of the lowest gun-related death rates in the developed world.

The country overhauled its gun laws after a massacre in 1996, when 35 people were killed by a single gunman in the Tasmanian town of Port Arthur. Following the shooting, public anger prompted the government to ban assault rifles and many other semiautomatic rifles and shotguns.

It also imposed new registration requirements and imposed gun buybacks that removed up to a third of privately held guns from circulation and melted down up to a million guns.

Who were some of the victims?

As the authorities worked to notify the next of kin of those killed and injured — who ranged in age from 10 to 87, according to the authorities — some of their identities began to emerge.

Chabad, the Jewish movement that organized the event at Bondi, identified one of the victims as Rabbi Eli Schlanger, saying he was an assistant rabbi of Chabad of Bondi and a “devoted” chaplain who worked tirelessly as a Chabad emissary. Zohran Mamdani, the mayor-elect of New York City, said on social media that Rabbi Schlanger had deep roots to the Crown Heights neighborhood in Brooklyn.

Chabad also named two more people who were killed in the attack: Reuven Morrison, a member of the Chabad community who divided his time between Melbourne and Sydney; and Alex Kleytman, a Holocaust survivor who attended the event with his children and grandchildren.

Dan Elkayam, a French citizen, was among those killed in the attack, President Emmanuel Macron of France said on social media.

What we know about the suspects.

Investigators did not release the names of the suspects, but described them as a 50-year-old man and his 24-year-old son. The older man died after being shot by police and the younger man sustained “critical injuries,” the police said on Monday morning.

Although officials described the shooting as a terrorist attack, Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon of the New South Wales Police Force declined to comment on the suspects’ ideology, saying that investigators needed time to dig. The police were not searching for any other assailants, he said.

Although Commissioner Lanyon said that one of the suspects had been known to the police, he said investigators had no indication that either man had been planning the shooting.

Johnny Diaz contributed reporting.

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