Jessica Rosen lies on the grass, shielding an unfamiliar little girl with her body. She is five months pregnant, does not know the child’s name and cannot see her parents, but speaks softly to her as bullets fly around them.
“Everything is all right. I’m with you. We’ll be safe. Nothing will happen to us,” Rosen whispers.Minutes earlier, she had been searching for her own young son. Then she notices the crying child and instinctively throws herself over her. From where she is lying, she sees a woman about a metre away being shot in the head.
“She was a person, and then she wasn’t a person anymore,” Rosen recounts.The victim’s blood runs down her forehead, while fragments of the woman’s body land in her hair. “All I could do was lie there. It was only a matter of time,” she says.
The festival interrupted by gunfire
On 14 December 2025, around 1,000 people gather at Archer Park near Bondi Beach in Sydney for “Chanukah by the Sea” – a family event marking the beginning of the Jewish festival of Hanukkah. Children have their faces painted, visit a petting zoo and celebrate by the ocean.
Shortly after 6:40 p.m., two armed men take up positions on an elevated pedestrian bridge and begin shooting at people in the park. Some of those present initially mistake the sound for fireworks. Over the course of about eight minutes, 15 people are killed, including 10-year-old Matilda Britvan, and dozens are wounded.
Almost a year later, 90-year-old Eva Geller dies in hospital from the injuries she sustained in the attack. She was a Holocaust survivor. The attack becomes Australia’s deadliest mass shooting since the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, in which 35 people were killed.
“I’d rather die trying”
Leibel Lazaroff, a 20-year-old rabbinical intern from Texas, realises almost immediately that the sounds are gunfire. He takes cover beside his car and then sees a wounded police officer. Lazaroff crawls over to him and uses his T-shirt to make a makeshift tourniquet.
While trying to help, he himself is shot in the abdomen. “I’m 20 years old. I never expected to die this way,” he recalls. Lazaroff says he was thinking about his future and the family he had hoped to start.
Elon Zizer is at the event with his two children and his parents. When the shooting begins, the three adults lie on top of the children to protect them. Zizer is shot six times.
“We were in the front row and this man was approaching. I knew we were doomed. But I would always rather die trying than simply be executed,” he recounts.From her home opposite the beach, Caitlin Davidson sees the attackers firing and reloading their weapons. “There was no pause or hesitation. Just killing,” says the former trauma ward nurse.
Footage of the attack also shows passer-by Ahmed Al-Ahmed grabbing one of the attackers from behind and taking his weapon. The accounts of survivors, victims’ relatives, witnesses and first responders are featured in a Channel 4 documentary dedicated to the events at Bondi Beach.
Sources: dailymail.co.uk, abc.net.au