Security forces arrest an Israeli anti-government protester who was blocking a road during a four-day sit-in near the Parliament in Jerusalem on April 1, 2024, calling for the dissolution of the government and the return of Israelis held hostage in Gaza. (Credit: Menahem Kahana/AFP)
Thousands of Israelis protested Monday night in Jerusalem, demanding elections be held and calling for a cease-fire deal that would facilitate the return of hostages, Haaretz reports.
Monday's protests came on the coattails of similar anti-government protests held in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv on Sunday night when tens of thousands filled the streets in the largest demonstrations since Oct. 7.
The widow of an Israeli soldier spoke to the crowd on Monday, calling on Knesset members to resign, saying they "have destroyed beyond anything imaginable," and condemning the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.
"The destruction and poverty and hunger in Gaza are an atrocity," Noga Friedman said. "And one should not be proud of a moral collapse that celebrates blood, blood and more blood, in a cycle of revenge that has no end. Woe to the public in which it is forbidden to express human compassion." She also criticized Israeli leadership "whose solution to the violence and humiliation we have experienced is only more and more destruction and power."
On Feb. 20, the Israel Democracy Institute released the results of a survey which found that the majority of Israelis no longer considered it likely that Israel would achieve an “absolute victory” — a phrase chosen specifically to echo Isreali PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s comments — against Hamas in Gaza.
Earlier on Monday, Israeli police arrested five people participating in a demonstration that blocked a main coastal highway in protest against the expiring exemption of ultra-Orthodox Jews from military conscription, according to a Haaretz report. Protestors brought an olive tree into the highway and lay underneath it. Ultra-Orthodox Jews have traditionally been exempt, for religious reasons, from having to serve in the army.
Netanyahu’s government is divided on the issue and has yet to come up with a response to the Israeli High Court of Justice’s 2017 ruling that found the military exceptions “discriminatory and illegal,” according to a report from Times of Israel.
The court set March 31st as the date by which the government was supposed to have addressed the issue and complied with the ruling.