“Payback for Gaza”: Sydney Actionists Target Thales Operations on Dharug for Palestine
Activists conducted a property damaging direct action at the French company's western Sydney facility
A group of pro-Palestinian antigenocide actionists descended upon the Thales Underwater Systems facility located on Dharug land in the western Sydney suburb of Rydalmere early morning on Monday, 6 October 2025, and they caused significant property damage to the facility’s main receiving dock and offices.
Footage posted to social media shows figures dressed in black spraying painting the Thales facility, which included the messaging, “Payback for Gaza”. The actionists further smashed office windows with hammers and doused computer hardware and the dock in red paint. Those mobilising in response to the Gaza genocide further warned on a wall in spray paint that they’d “be back”.
“Of its many complicities, Thales runs a joint drone venture with the Israeli weapons company Elbit Systems,” a spokesperson for the actionists said.
The autonomous individuals escalating for Palestine declared in a 7 October statement that the Rydalmere direct action marked the first in “a series of operations targeting weapons manufacturers and war profiteers across unceded Gadigal and Dharug lands” that continue to aid and abet the “illegitimate Zionist entity” – or the apartheid state of Israel – in its commission of genocide in Gaza.
Property damaging direct actions have been increasing in the local setting since Israel commenced its mass slaughter and starvation program in Gaza in October 2023, so its highly likely the NSW police has paid attention to the future intentions of the group, which made a successful splash at the home of Thales on Dharug land.
Profiteering on genocide
“Thales Underwater Systems also cooperates with reactionary Arab regimes by outfitting sonar, radar and communications systems to their naval warfare systems in attempt to break Yemen’s honourable blockade of the Red Sea,” the actionists further stated on 7 October.
“We act in solidarity with the people of Gaza, who, with their flesh and souls, have created a trench between the global supply chain of genocide and our necks.”
Disclose reported in March that French company Thales had been selling electronic components and communications systems to Israeli companies for use in local drones over the period 2018 to 2023, and these were invariably going to be used upon Palestinians civilians. The report tracks this arrangement via a series of 12 invoices addressed to Elbit Systems and Israel Aerospace Industries.
In terms of the Thales Australia Rydalmere facility that was hit on 6 October, it’s the site of an Acoustics Centre of Excellence, which involves defence and naval operations. Amnesty International has been warning that the Australian government ought to abide by the Arms Trade Treaty to ensure that ammunition produced by Thales is not being used in the commission of war crimes.
Amnesty set out in April that the Albanese government should “immediately suspend export permits” related to ammunition produced by Thales, Lockheed Martin and Electro Optic Systems exported to the US, while it makes sure that these products are not being sold to Israel. This was in the wake of an image of an EOS R400 remote weapons system ending up with Israeli Defence Force officers.
Another key weapons export scandal that’s evolved over the course of the Gaza genocide was broken by Declassified Australia, and it involves Australian company Rosebank Engineering being the sole supplier of the device that opens and closes the weapons bay doors on F-35 fighters, which are the jets that are predominately being used in the commission of mass slaughter in the Gaza Strip.
Obliged to take action
The Albanese government has been attempting to deflect from the fact that it has been continuing to trade in weapons with Israel. Defence minister Richard Marles and foreign minister Penny Wong have shifted their approach to this over time, from flat out denials to assuring that the nation only supplies “nonlethal” weapons components, as more and more hidden details have been unveiled.
Declassified’s Peter Cronau has this month revealed that the nation of Australia has directly couriered these components to Israel on a total of 68 times over the course of the extermination campaign in the Gaza Strip and since he broke that news on 1 October, federal Labor has gone and done it again. In fact, defence minister Marles signs off on everything that is being sent to Israel at present.
The second article of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide defines the crime as one or more of five actions done with “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. The actions comprise of killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, infliction of destructive conditions, forcible child removals and the prevention of births.
Australia ratified the Genocide Convention on 8 July 1949. Article one requires that state parties undertake all that they can to end an active genocide. This nation should have been attempting to stop the ongoing slaughter in Gaza, at least since the World Court ruled in January 2024 that there was a “plausible” genocide taking place in the Strip.
However, the Albanese government has refused to impose robust sanctions that could cause issues for the Israeli state, as it has with Russia over Ukraine, and instead federal Labor has continued the two-way trade in arms with the genocidal Netanyahu government, and it’s further left it up to autonomous individuals, like those at the Thales facility in Rydalmere, to toe the moral line.
