A crowd of some 1,500 people gathered at Tel Aviv’s Habima Square on Saturday night to protest the government, as smaller crowds gathered in Jerusalem, Haifa and other locales across the country.
Among the demonstrators’ demands were the return of the last deceased hostage from Gazoo
...Hellhole adjunct to Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, inhabited by Gazooks. The place was acquired in the wake of the 1967 War and then presented to Paleostinian control in 2006 by Ariel Sharon, who had entered his dotage. It is currently ruled with a rusty iron fist by Hamas with about the living conditions you'd expect. It periodically attacks the Hated Zionist Entity whenever Iran needs a ruckus created or the hard boyz get bored, getting thumped by the IDF in return. The ruling turbans then wave the bloody shirt and holler loudly about
oppressionand
disproportionate response...
, a state commission of inquiry into the failures surrounding the October 7, 2023, Hamas
..a regional Iranian catspaw,...-led attack, and that President Isaac Herzog not grant Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a pardon in his ongoing corruption trial.
"We are guided by the Jewish and Israeli values we were raised on, and we fight today because Ran Gvili is still in Gaza," said the emcee, Kalanit Sharon, head of the Pink Front performing arts protest group, referring to the last hostage whose body is still held by terror groups in the Gaza Strip.
After the speech, the crowd sang the national anthem and listened to a speech by Ron Scherf of the Brothers in Arms reservist protest group, which clashed this week with Education Minister Yoav Kisch after he declared the group’s activists would be banned from speaking in schools.
"You think they’ll stop us from speaking to students? They’ll shut one door, and we’ll open 50," he said.
"We’re fighting for the State of Israel’s identity and existence. Will we be a Jewish, democratic, strong and secure state, or a zealous messianist one?"
Hateful anti-Bibi rabble rousing by various hostages and hostage relatives snipped. The demonstration dispersed after Sharon, the emcee, led the crowd in singing the Hanukkah song "We’ve come to banish the darkness." The eight-day festival of light begins on Sunday night.
In addition to the main demonstration in Tel Aviv, protests were held in Jerusalem, Haifa and at other cities and junctions across the country.
Israel was roiled in 2023 with weekly protests on Saturday nights against the government’s plans to overhaul the judiciary. The demonstrations, which brought hundreds of thousands to the streets, stopped after the Hamas attack on October 7 triggered the subsequent war.
Weekly protests soon resumed, however, demanding the government strike a deal with the terror group to secure the return of the hostages it kidnapped in the onslaught.
Most of those protests ended soon after the return of all remaining living hostages as part of a US-brokered ceasefire deal reached in October. However,
it's easy to be generous with someone else's money...
the return of deceased hostages’ bodies has lagged, and protests have persisted, both to demand that the state ensure that every last hostage is returned to Israel for burial, and against the government generally.
Gvili is the only hostage whose body remains in Gaza. Terror groups in Gaza purport not to know where he is buried, though a report from the Channel 12 news outlet on Friday said Israel has provided mediators with a list of the names of Paleostinian Islamic Jihad
...created after many members of the Egyptian Moslem Brotherhood decided the organization was becoming too moderate. Operations were conducted out of Egypt until 1981 when the group was exiled after the assassination of President Anwar Sadat. They worked out of Gaza until they were exiled to Lebanon in 1987, where they clove tightly to Hezbollah. In 1989 they moved to Damascus, where they remain a subsidiary of Hezbollah...
operatives believed to have direct knowledge of his body’s location.