Ethnocultural minority communities may require specialised emergency response frameworks during mass casualty incidents (MCIs). This article describes the Sydney Jewish community's preparation for, and medical response to, the Bondi Beach terror attack of 14 December 2025. We present a timeline of events during the attack and outline the immediate medical response and recovery actions undertaken in the first hours and days following the incident, including first-hand accounts of responders from the scene. Alongside this account, we present a novel response model implemented by the New South Wales Community Health Support (CHS). CHS is a community-operated, not-for-profit emergency medical response organisation that provides telehealth advice and dispatches volunteer community first responders (including health professionals and trained emergency healthcare workers) to urgent and emergency health incidents within the local community. CHS operates alongside statutory emergency services and is embedded within the community it serves. It is hoped that the lessons identified from this incident may be valuable to the broader international medical community, emergency management agencies and policymakers, and that it may serve as an exemplar for other communities seeking to strengthen preparedness, coordination and resilience in the face of future MCIs.
Baron et al. (Wed,) studied this question.