Protesters on Sunday flooded the streets of Israeli cities in mass demonstrations demanding that the government immediately accept a deal for the release of hostages held in the Gaza Strip. The furious protests, some of the largest the country has seen over months of failed negotiations, came after the Israeli military announced that six of the hostages had recently been killed in Gaza.
In Tel Aviv, Israel, protest organizers put the number of people in the hundreds of thousands. Hostage families and a crowd of supporters carried six prop coffins in a march through the city. They swarmed in front of the Israeli military headquarters and clashed with police on a major highway.
In Jerusalem, Israeli police fired skunk water, a noxious crowd-control weapon, and forcefully removed a crowd of hundreds who rallied at the city’s main entrance. In smaller cities, including Rehovot, in central Israel, people blocked traffic and chanted, “We want them back living, not in coffins!”
The national uproar built on months of protests and increasingly aggressive actions by the families of many hostages, who have been attempting to pressure Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to accept a deal to little avail.
The frustration of the families, who have accused Netanyahu of sacrificing their loved ones for his own political gain, appeared to reach a boiling point Sunday after the Israeli military said it had recovered the bodies of six hostages killed in Gaza. The Israeli health ministry said they had been shot at close range sometime between Thursday and Friday morning.
Their blood was on the hands of the Israeli government, said the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, a group that represents some of the relatives, and it called on the public to “bring the nation to a halt.”
The message was echoed by Israel’s largest labor union, which declared a strike beginning Monday morning, and by Yair Lapid, the Israeli opposition leader.
The families forum said hundreds of thousands of people were protesting around the country Sunday evening, but it was not possible to verify the figure. Israeli police declined to provide any estimates of crowd sizes.
More protests were planned for Monday, the families forum said on social media.
Several family members of the hostages directed their anger squarely at Netanyahu as they agitated for public action.
“Whoever accepts the murder of civilians for the Prime Minister should stay home,” Gil Dickmann, whose cousin Carmel Gat was one of the hostages found dead over the weekend, said on the social network X. “Those who don’t: in memory of Carmel, take to the streets — stop the abandonment, bring the state to a halt, get a deal.”
Jonathan Dekel-Chen, whose son Sagui is still held in Gaza, said in an interview that Netanyahu was “not only endangering our national security by refusing to complete this negotiated settlement, he’s also tearing apart this country by its seams. The country is aware that this government doesn’t exist for the service of the country but the service of itself.”
In Tel Aviv, where some of the largest crowds gathered, tensions escalated as night fell. Protesters blocked the main highway, pushed through security barricades and lit bonfires in the streets while the Israeli police carried out violent detentions and fired water cannons into the crowd. Naama Lazimi, a member of the Israeli parliament, said on social media that police had also thrown stun grenades at a close range, knocking her to the ground.
After hours of demonstrations, the Israeli police said it had arrested 29 people in Tel Aviv and cleared the highway. Five protesters were also arrested in Jerusalem, and two in Haifa, according to police officials.
Protesters expressed a mix of grief and rage, many carrying photos of the hostages and waving yellow ribbons in solidarity.
Shiraz Angert, a 23-year-old design student who was protesting in Jerusalem, wore a shirt bearing the photo of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, one of the hostages whose bodies were recovered Saturday. “It was possible to save them in a deal,” she said. “These are people who were sacrificed because we didn’t do enough.”
In Tel Aviv, Dan Levinson, a 59-year-old high school teacher, said he hoped the night’s protest would be a watershed moment.
“I feel that tonight is the last chance for a turning point — people out in the streets tonight understand that what we have not been able to achieve so far into the war, we will not be able to ever reach unless a decision is made,” he said.
“If it does not happen now,” he added, “it never will.”