As it happened: PM says October 7 ‘not a day for demonstrations’; Gaza ceasefire talks under way in Egypt

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Join us again tomorrow for continuing coverage of news as it happens, or take a look back at today’s biggest stories:

• Communications Minister Anika Wells has outlined powers the Triple Zero custodian will gain under the new legislation introduced today. Wells told parliament that from November 1, telecommunications carriers will have to report real-time outages to the communications regulator and to emergency services, and will have to test Triple Zero during upgrades and maintenance. During question time, Wells fended off fierce criticism from the Coalition, who accuse her of failing to take responsibility for her role in the fallout of Optus’ outages.
• Gaza ceasefire talks are under way in Egypt, with delegations from the US, Israel and Hamas in indirect negotiations. A key sign of progress in the talks will be whether Hamas frees all the roughly 20 remaining live hostages — plus the remains of the dead — in return for Israel releasing about 2000 Palestinian prisoners. The US and Israel aim to use the negotiations to finalise US President Donald Trump’s 20-point peace plan for Gaza, although Hamas has not yet agreed to all the conditions of the plan. Trump has expressed optimism for the plan’s success.
• Political leaders have condemned pro-Hamas graffiti scrawled in several locations in Melbourne which read “Glory to Hamas”, “Oct 7, do it again” and “Glory to the martyrs”. Appearing on the second anniversary of the Hamas October 7 attacks on Israelis, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Opposition Leader Sussan Ley strongly denounced the graffiti. Pro-Palestine protests scheduled for today have also come under fire by politicians who deemed the timing inappropriate.
• Australian pro-Palestinian activists have made allegations of violent physical abuse and the withholding of food and water by Israeli authorities, who have dismissed the claims of aid flotilla participants who sailed to Gaza as “fake news”. Seven Australians were among the hundreds of people detained by Israeli authorities last week, with some making statements to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade that they had experienced systematic abuse during their detention, including sleep deprivation, the denial of food and water, and physical violence that had resulted in one detainee suffering a dislocated arm.
• Indonesian rescuers have ended the search for victims trapped under the rubble of a collapsed Islamic boarding school in the province of East Java, after retrieving 61 bodies. Grief and confusion gripped the small town of Sidoarjo last week after foundational failures caused the Al Khoziny school to cave in on hundreds of people, mostly teenage boys, while they were at afternoon prayers. Most of them escaped.
• The US Supreme Court has rejected an appeal from Ghislaine Maxwell, the imprisoned former girlfriend of Jeffrey Epstein. As is their custom, the justices did not explain why.

Communications Minister Anika Wells bears some responsibility for the fallout of Optus’ Triple Zero outages, Liberal MP Aaron Violi has said.

Wells spent much of question time fending off criticism from the Coalition for flying to New York to address the UN during the crisis, and pinned the blame for the outages squarely on Optus.

She also played down allegations that the government had waited too long to introduce Triple Zero reform after a review was undertaken following a November 2023 outage.

However, Violi said Wells must be accountable.

“We have the extraordinary situation in question time where the minister refused to take responsibility … for a communications breakdown with the Triple Zero system, and at the same time this government is rushing through legislation and they are arguing to fix the problem,” Violi told the ABC. “That is a complete contradiction.”

He added that Wells “has not even taken the time to call all the victims and the families of those who lost their lives, and that is a disgrace and she needs to take responsibility and be held to account”.

The families of former Islamic State fighters have the right to return to Australia as citizens, says Assistant Foreign Affairs Minister Matt Thistlethwaite.

Two women and four children of former ISIS fighters have returned to Melbourne after paying people smugglers to escape the lawless al-Hawl camp in north-eastern Syria.

“A lot of those people would be Australian citizens, so they have a right to return to Australia,” Thistlethwaite told the ABC.

“Our government hasn’t provided any assistance or anything like that, aside from the normal assistance that any Australian gets returning to their homelands.”

Can we trust food labels? As in, is the chicken in the supermarket fridge really free-range like it says it is? Are the “local” prawns from a fishmonger at the market really Australian?

Today on The Morning Edition science reporter Angus Dalton discusses new technology developed by scientists that can uncover where food truly comes from, and the results may well lead you to question what you’re buying on your weekly shop.