Only two police officers were on duty at the Hanukkah event on Sydney’s Bondi Beach on Sunday, where two terrorists killed 15 people and wounded dozens more, a senior official said Tuesday.

The revelation came as information continued to surface about the father-and-son duo who carried out the terror shooting, and as Jewish community leaders accused the Australian government of allowing antisemitism to fester leading up to the attack.

“The police were tasked with being on the site during the festival. My understanding is that there were two in the park during or at the beginning of the shooting, the assassinations,” New South Wales Premier Chris Minns told Sky News Australia.

“And there were police in the vicinity, so a patrol car pulled up within moments of the firing beginning,” he said. “I think it’s important to note that police, obviously, when the shooting began, did engage the shooters and there’s two in critical condition in NSW hospitals.”

Witnesses have said the two gunmen opened fire for as long as ten minutes, shooting into the crowd of families attending the event to mark the Jewish festival of lights.

Some 1,000 people were in attendance at the open-air event. The attack was the deadliest to strike a Diaspora Jewish community in decades, and the worst antisemitic attack outside of Israel since October 7, 2023.

Minns said the police force is now gathering information on the locations of other nearby officers at the time the attack began.

“We have several police officers who engaged with sidearms from 50 meters [160 feet] away, firing with someone who had a long-arm and a tactical advantage over NSW Police,” Minns said. “So they did engage and they did shoot both of the offenders, killing one of them.”

New video has emerged of unarmed bystanders Boris and Sofia Gurman who sought to thwart the gunmen, father and son Sajid and Naveed Akram, and almost stopped them before they began their killing spree. The Gurmans were........

© The Times of Israel