Bondi Beach is a place that’s meant to represent everything relaxed and safe about Australia, but speaking to Dovi and his wife Devorah Leah, it felt more like the scene from a horror movie.

“We were the furtherest away when the shooting first started… my wife and two kids were waiting in line… and I was just standing outside,” Dovi told me. Then the shots rang out. “A person right next to me got hit quite badly … and that’s when I realised, okay, it’s not like fireworks … it’s real.”

I am, you are, we are Australian. 🇦🇺🇦🇺❤️ pic.twitter.com/4mkYntDIJd

— Avi Yemini (@OzraeliAvi) December 21, 2025

Dovi grabbed his baby daughter and ran. Only later did he learn he’d been shot himself. “They said that it was the shotgun that hit me … I was very lucky,” he said. Lucky, but only just.

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What stuck with me was his disbelief. “How the hell is this happening … this is Bondi Beach,” he said, describing families swimming, kids playing, life going on, until it wasn’t. When he came back searching for his wife and children, what he saw was “carnage, absolute carnage”.

Dovi also didn’t hold back on the failures. It “took 20 minutes before anybody even [arrived]”, and responders were “very underprepared for an event like that, which they should have been expecting”.

Then there’s the denial. As Dovi put it, “It’s crazy.” While victims were bleeding, online influencers were already rewriting reality.

A few months ago, Ehtesham Ahmad paraded on a horse on Bondi Beach with a Palestinian flag.

pic.twitter.com/GjIjmHvUCG

— Marina Medvin 🇺🇸 (@MarinaMedvin) December 14, 2025

That’s where the infamous pro-Palestine horse rider comes in: Ehtesham Ahmad, who like the terrorists on that day, an immigrant from Pakistan. Earlier this year, he rode along this same beach waving a Palestinian flag and intimidating locals, including a Jewish teenager.

This is a man who has been celebrated by the mainstream media as a success story of multiculturalism in previous interviews, but who has clearly shown his values fall short of what it means to be an Australian. Now, he’s spreading AI-generated images, falsely claiming this terror attack was a hoax.

‼️🇦🇺 This AI image is going viral to prove that the Bondi Beach shooting didn’t actually happen and Arsen Ostrovsky faked being shot in the head.

The makeup artist has extra fingers and Arsen’s shirt has gibberish letters on it.

X needs to flag accounts that push this stuff. pic.twitter.com/KErF6oIAmV

— Max 📟 (@MaxNordau) December 15, 2025

I raised it because it matters. This man has been celebrated by mainstream media, and yet he’s now calling survivors liars.

When Dovi couldn’t find his family, he said, “I thought that’s it … they could have all … been killed.” His wife told me she believed the same. “I thought I had lost my husband and baby that day,” she said.

This isn’t abstract. These are people I know. This is my community. And as Dovi warned, the Jewish community has been saying for years “it’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when”.

Bondi proved them right — and Australia still isn’t listening.