Wollongong Lord Mayor Gordon Bradbery has described Israel's actions against the Palestinian people as "nothing more than just a holocaust".
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Speaking on Saturday at a Wollongong rally in support of Palestine, the lord mayor said "one holocaust does not deserve another".
The Wollongong University Student Association, Wollongong Socialists and Students for Palestine-run rally coincided with similar events in Sydney and Melbourne.
Speaker after speaker at the Wollongong rally demanded the Morrison government finally act against Israel for decades of "ethnic cleansing".
A fragile ceasefire is holding in Gaza after Israel and Hamas agreed to pause 11 days of bloodshed that's so far killed about 250 Palestinians, including 66 children, and 12 Israeli civilians and a soldier.
Hundreds have also been wounded on both sides after after Israeli forces tried to forcibly evict Palestinians from their homes in the neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah and stormed the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.
Cr Bradbery said it was important to "remind our government we need a two-state solution which will allow the people of Palestine to be free".
"I'm very conscious of the fact that Gaza has an incredible concentration of human beings, 5000 human beings per kilometre - and it is a concentration of misery, created and supported by western governments," he said.
"I'm also very conscious of the fact that our Aboriginal brothers and sisters have been ill treated as well, but at least we are doing something about it, whereas in Palestine we are just kicking the can down the road once more.
"We might have come to a truce but it hasn't eliminated the essential problem of the concentration of human misery in Gaza, and the deprivation of the rights of the people on the West Bank.
The establishment of Israel was created in terror as well.
- Wollongong Lord Mayor Gordon Bradbery
"We need to work for peace but a just peace. I do not want the Palestinians to be labelled as a terrorist when Israel exercised the same thing in 1948 when they were bombing.
"The establishment of Israel was created in terror as well."
Gaza man Shamikh Badra, who is now studying at the University of Wollongong, said the Palestinian people would never give up until they were free from Israeli occupation.
"Despite the Israeli forces destroying houses over the heads of the civilians, killing hundreds of people in their homes, apartments and high-rise buildings, Gaza will never die and will resist aggression, occupation and colonization," Mr Badra said.
"Secondly, in spite of Israeli's campaign of ethnic cleansing in East Jerusalem, especially its expulsion of Palestinians from Sheikh Jarrah in order to establish its colonial project of greater Jerusalem, Palestinians will remain in Jerusalem, and they will never leave their homes.
"I'd like to emphasize that the Israeli colonial project in Jerusalem will fail and Jerusalem will remain the capital of Palestine."
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