Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Last week, Adelaide identity and businessman Sam Shahin organised the display of a public banner with the names and ages of the 18,457 children killed in Gaza between 7 October 2023 and 19 July 2025. More have died since then. The banner placed on North Terrace in Adelaide's CBD was a reproduction of an initiative by well-known US artist Phil Buehler titled Wall of Tears that is now exhibited in Brooklyn, New York. Within about a day of the Adelaide banner being installed, it was vandalised, torn down and removed.

The Palestinian children killed and listed on the banner had done no wrong to Israel and had no say in political events in their homeland. They were innocent, defenceless children. The Wall of Tears banner presented a confronting truth about Israel's incursion into Gaza. It is a truth that cannot be ignored; a truth that these are not just statistics but 18,457 real lives of innocent children and babies who were violently killed as expendable casualties of conflict; and a truth that will not go away by tearing down a banner, because, unlike the lives of the children, the banner can and will be replaced.

See this speech in context