Australia\u2019s Usman Khawaja staged a muted protest against the war in Gaza on Thursday, wearing a black armband during the first Test against Pakistan and taping up messages on his shoes. The opening batsman had wanted to wear shoes emblazoned with the hand-written slogans \u201cFreedom is a human right\u201d and \u201cAll lives are equal\u201d during the match at Perth. But Pakistan-born Khawaja, who is a Muslim, was told that it flouted International Cricket Council rules on messages that relate to politics, religion or race. With Cricket Australia saying it expected the players to uphold the rules, Khawaja covered over the slogans with semi-transparent tape leaving the words \u2014 in the colour of the Palestinian flag \u2014 visible only in close-up. According to local media, Cricket Australia said Khawaja was wearing the armband as a show of solidarity. Many thousands of Gazans have been killed in the 10-week-old Israeli bombardment, sparked by Hamas raids into Israel on October 7 that killed 1,200 people. In a video Khawaja recently shared on social media, he asked: \u201cDo people not care about innocent humans being killed?\u201d Khawaja has vowed to fight the ban on his footwear, calling it \u201ca humanitarian appeal\u201d. He doubled down on his stance just before going in to bat in the first Test on Thursday. \u201cI just think that so much has happened in the past that sets a precedent,\u201d Khawaja told Fox Cricket. \u201cOther guys that have religious things on their equipment, under the ICC guidelines that\u2019s not technically allowed, but the ICC never says anything on that,\u201d he added. Australian captain Pat Cummins said he was \u201creally proud\u201d of his teammate and of other squad members who had spoken up for what they believe in.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Australia\u2019s Usman Khawaja staged a muted protest against the war in Gaza on Thursday, wearing a black armband during the first Test against Pakistan and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12201,"comment_status":"registered_only","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12200"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12200\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12201"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}