Politics Mass protests in Israel after recovery of dead Gaza hostages
In the largest mass protests in Israel since the beginning of the Gaza war, hundreds of thousands have demanded an immediate agreement with the Islamist Hamas, according to media reports.
02.09.2024, 04:59
SDA
Following the discovery of the bodies of six hostages in the Gaza Strip, Israel's trade union umbrella organization wants to bring the country to a standstill for a day today with an unprecedented general strike - and thus increase the pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to agree to a deal for the release of the remaining hostage.
Some of the protests in Tel Aviv and other cities led to clashes with the police. According to local media, dozens of arrests were made. According to estimates by the organizers, around 300,000 people gathered in the coastal metropolis of Tel Aviv alone, as reported by the "Times of Israel" in the evening. There were no official figures.
"We can no longer stand by and watch. The fact that Jews are being murdered in the tunnels of Gaza is unacceptable," union leader Arnon Bar David was quoted as saying by the news website "ynet". "We have to make a deal (with Hamas), a deal is more important than anything else." The protest strike is due to begin at 06:00 local time (05:00 CEST), Israeli media reported. Ben Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv is also to go on strike and flight operations are to be paralyzed.
Protesters demand the release of the remaining hostages
According to the Times of Israel, Israel's far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called on the Attorney General to issue a temporary injunction to prevent the general strike. Smotrich, like the radical right-wing police minister Itamar Ben Gvir, rejects concessions to Hamas and has repeatedly threatened Prime Minister Netanyahu with the collapse of the government.
The Israeli army announced on Sunday morning that six hostage bodies had been discovered shortly beforehand in an underground tunnel in the south of the Gaza Strip. The news portal "Axios" quoted the National Forensic Institute as saying that the hostages had been shot at close range around 48 to 72 hours before the autopsy of the bodies. According to the report, they were murdered between Thursday and Friday morning. A spokesman for the Hamas terrorist organization, however, said that the hostages had been killed by Israeli bombardment.
"We will not abandon them," chanted demonstrators in Tel Aviv, referring to the fate of the 101 hostages still held by the Islamists. They marched with blue and white national flags on the city's central streets. The coffins of the six hostages who were killed were symbolically laid out on a stage.
Participants in the protest rally blocked a central highway in the evening. According to media reports, they threw stones, fences, nails and metal objects onto the road, lit a fire and shot fireworks into the air. The police finally cleared the road and used stun grenades.
Protests also took place in other cities in Israel. The demonstrators demanded a swift deal from the government that would enable a ceasefire in the Gaza war and the release of hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. The indirect negotiations between Israel and Hamas, in which Qatar and Egypt are acting as mediators alongside the USA, have been stuck for months.
Report: Mediators plan final attempt at negotiations
According to the Washington Post, the mediators want to present a final proposal for an agreement to the parties to the conflict in the coming weeks. Should both sides again fail to accept this, it could mean the end of the negotiations, a senior official in US President Joe Biden's administration was quoted as saying. The discovery of six dead hostages in Gaza had shown the urgency of an agreement.
Recent surveys by the Jerusalem-based research center Israel Democracy Institute (IDI) have shown that 82 percent of Israelis support an agreement on the release of the hostages in the Gaza Strip in some form, the Wall Street Journal reported. However, supporters remain deeply divided over the conditions for an agreement. "There are people who say we have to get the hostages back; others say we have to continue the war to secure the south," the US newspaper quoted Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to the US, as saying. "It's been the same since the first day of the war, nothing has changed," he told the newspaper.
The main point of contention in the negotiations is currently the question of how long Israeli troops may remain stationed at the Philadelphi Corridor in southern Gaza on the border with Egypt. Israel's security cabinet recently decided to maintain control of the corridor. In a statement issued by the relatives of the abductees, it was said that Netanyahu and his coalition partners had decided to "torpedo the agreement on a ceasefire for the corridor, thereby knowingly condemning the hostages to death".
Defense Minister: We must bring the hostages home
Defense Minister Joav Galant called for the security cabinet's decision to be reversed. "It is too late for the hostages who were murdered in cold blood," Galant wrote on Platform X. "We must bring the hostages who are still in Hamas captivity home." According to media reports, Galant had a heated exchange of words with Netanyahu during the cabinet meeting.
Meanwhile, a vaccination campaign against the polio virus has begun in the center of the sealed-off Palestinian territory. After the first case of polio in 25 years recently occurred in the embattled coastal strip, around 640,000 children are to be immunized against the highly contagious virus, according to the WHO. Two doses of the vaccine are usually administered four weeks apart.
Polio vaccinations started in Gaza
During the vaccination campaign, which began on Sunday and will last just over a week and is to be extended to other parts of Gaza, Israel's army said it wanted to observe pauses in fighting that were limited in terms of time and location. According to his office, Netanyahu emphasized that the breaks in fighting were not a ceasefire in the traditional sense.
The Gaza war was triggered by the worst massacre in Israel's history, with more than 1,200 dead, carried out by terrorists from Hamas and other extremist groups in the Israeli border region on October 7 last year. Since then, the number of Palestinians killed in the war in Gaza has risen to more than 40,700, according to the Hamas-controlled health authority in the coastal area. The figure does not distinguish between combatants and civilians and is almost impossible to verify.
