Of all the images published from the roiling, pro-Palestinian rallies that have occupied the centre of Melbourne every Sunday for the past 15 months, there is one that remains impossible to reconcile.

It is a portrait of two protesters, a young, handsome man and a woman, in stylised pose. She has dark hair and a distinctive tattoo; he is sporting a hipster beard, framed by an elegantly knotted keffiyeh scarf, and is holding with apparent reverence a picture of Yahya Sinwar.

Pro-Palestine protesters hold a placard of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, at a rally in Melbourne’s CBD in October 2024.Credit: Getty Images

Sinwar, the Hamas leader shot dead by Israeli troops in October, was a principle architect of the atrocities in southern Israel which resulted in the murder of 1200 people and abduction of 251 hostages and provoked a war in which Israel is estimated to have killed nearly 47,000 Gazans.

He earlier made his bones as Hamas’s cruel and manipulative leader of al-Majd, an internal security apparatus which enforced the terrorist organisation’s strict morality code. He tortured and murdered anyone he suspected of collaborating with the Israelis. He spent 23 years in an Israeli jail for murdering a dozen Palestinians.

Long before his men butchered young Jewish and Arab Israelis at a music festival, he was terrorising Gazans – the same people Melbourne protesters are marching for.

It was tempting to dismiss this image of the two protesters as the product of ignorant but........

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