Calls to investigate 40 Israeli soldiers who ran in Sydney

Some 40 serving and former Israeli soldiers took part in the Sydney Marathon on Sunday, and Palestinian solidarity organisations spent the day pressing the Australian government to say how the group was granted entry to the country.

Hundreds of people stood along the route as the race went past. They carried Palestinian flags and posters asking that war criminals be kept out of the event and that Australia "cut ties with apartheid Israel", and many wore keffiyehs or the watermelon motif that stands in for the Palestinian flag.

The visiting group included men from the Golani Brigade and from Unit 8200, the Israeli army's signals intelligence formation. A member of the UN commission of inquiry that found Israel to be committing genocide in Gaza has called Golani one of the "most criminally accused brigades" fielded by that army. One runner, Roy Oryon, was a deputy company commander in the brigade's 13th Battalion, a unit that fought in Gaza and went in at the front of Israel's push into southern Lebanon; Golani soldiers have also been tied to an ambush last year in which 15 paramedics and rescue workers were killed.

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement said in a statement that "Australian authorities have a legal obligation to act", and that the duty to look into and prosecute people suspected of genocide falls on every state rather than on the courts of one. Campaigns run online in the week before the race identified some of the participants by name and by the unit they had served in, and asked the organisers and state officials to examine the entries.

The rule the campaigners point to is already written into Australian law. Ministerial Direction 110, made under the Migration Act, lets an application be refused where the applicant belongs to, or is connected with, a group that can reasonably be suspected of a part in genocide, war crimes or crimes against humanity. Asked whether extra character or security screening had been applied, a spokesperson for the Department of Home Affairs declined to discuss individual applicants "for privacy reasons", saying only that everyone who is not a citizen has to meet the identity, health, character and security requirements of the migration legislation, and that each file is judged on its own.

The Australia Palestine Advocacy Network had asked on Thursday for urgent scrutiny of the reported entrants, arguing that a country cannot hold itself out as a defender of international law while admitting people suspected of grave international crimes without first looking into them. It also named several Israel-linked bodies in Australia that it said had sponsored the visit. The soldiers landed in the country days after the Israeli military declined to open a criminal case over the killing of the Australian aid worker Lalzawmi Frankcom in Gaza in 2024.

A marathon entry is an unusual place for this argument to surface, and that is much of its force. The character test is an ordinary administrative instrument, used every day on ordinary applicants, and it already contains the words the campaigners are quoting back at the department. What is being contested is not whether the standard exists but whether anybody applied it, and the department's answer — that files are assessed case by case, details confidential — leaves that question exactly where it was.