Speaking Saturday to some 2,000 people at Tel Aviv’s Hostages Square, freed hostage Doron Steinbrecher urged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to end the war, secure a hostage deal and “make Israel great again.”
“Six months ago, I saw the sun for the first time after 471 days in the tunnels,” Steinbrecher, who was released from Hamas captivity as part of a truce-hostage deal in January, said at the weekly rally. “Six months ago, I drew my first breath that wasn’t all fear.”
“Now, after six months, I still can’t breathe… without fear,” she continued. “It’ll take time. And the first step is that everyone comes back.”
Steinbrecher then addressed US President Donald Trump in English: “We have met and spoken; I know how personally important this is to you, how deeply you are involved, and I know what you are capable of. Make it happen. Let everyone emerge through the gates of hell so that we may rise.”
“Bibi and Trump,” she continued, using Netanyahu’s nickname. “Close the deal, [so] that we could make Israel great again!’
The demonstration began earlier in the evening with a moment of silence for the 893 IDF soldiers killed during and since the Hamas onslaught of October 7, 2023.
The silence was pierced by a quarrel that ignited on the square’s southern edge, where left-wing protesters typically gather ahead of Saturday-night demonstrations with signs decrying “war crimes” and “genocide” in Gaza. A man bearing an Israeli flag emblazoned with an anti-government logo yelled at the left-wing activists that they should be “embarrassed” and appeared to almost come to blows with one of them before others separated them.
After the moment of silence ended, the rally’s MC, an attorney who heads the anti-government group Mothers on the Front, launched into a tirade against Haredi exemptions from mandatory military service.
“You are more Jewish than all the Haredim in Bnei Brak,” Ayelet Hashachar Seidoff told the cheering crowd, referring to the large ultra-Orthodox city that neighbors Tel Aviv.
One of the speakers, Vered Shavit Fima, a mother of two combat soldiers, slammed the government’s attempt to codify the Haredi draft exemptions, saying that soldiers are suffering grave physical and psychological damage and are demanding an end to the war.
When they come home, she continued, they discover “deals made at their expense, the draft evasion law, the lengthening of service, money given to people who don’t serve while they are missing equipment.”
During her speech, the left-wing activists left to attend a silent vigil on Kaplan Street for Palestinian children killed in Gaza.
Protesters then joined with hostage families marching from three separate demonstrations. The participants in the rallies at Hostages Square, Begin Road and Habima Square marched on to a large demonstration outside the US Embassy Branch Office on Hayarkon Street.
A similar demonstration was held outside the US Consulate General building in Jerusalem.
Family members of hostages made their weekly remarks to the press before the rallies, with Itzik Horn, father of hostage Eitan Horn, slamming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for separating Eitan from his brother Iair, who was freed earlier this year as part of a ceasefire.
“My son Eitan is being held in inhumane conditions in a tunnel in Gaza and is dealing with a skin disease that is getting worse,” Horn said. “Netanyahu, you tore him away from his brother.”
The families of those held in Gaza have long campaigned for a comprehensive deal that would see all of the hostages brought home.
Einav Zanguaker, whose son Matan is held captive in Gaza, said it was “time for Israel to join hands with the US, to abandon the madness of eternal war and to advance Trump’s vision for ending the war and returning all the hostages.”
Trump said on Friday he believes that a breakthrough in a partial deal that would see at least 10 living hostages released was coming “very shortly.”
Like Horn, Zanguaker issued a call for a comprehensive deal that would see the release of all 50 people held by terrorists in Gaza, but placed the blame on Netanyahu for the lack of an agreement.
“[Netanyahu] is playing petty politics on the backs of the 50 hostages and our heroic soldiers. My Matan is sitting alone in the tunnels with muscular dystrophy that makes it difficult for him to stand on his own two feet. He doesn’t have time,” she said.
“Stop using selektzia. Jews do not make selections on their brothers,” she continued, addressing Netanyahu directly and referring to Nazis’ Holocaust-era practice of distinguishing between Jews deemed fit for hard labor and those who were to be immediately executed.
“We see the pressure that Trump is exerting to bring about a comprehensive agreement and end the war. He understands what people here refuse to understand — that only ending the war will ensure everyone’s return,” she said.
Terror groups in the Gaza Strip are holding 50 hostages, including 49 of the 251 abducted by Hamas-led terrorists on October 7, 2023. They include the bodies of at least 28 confirmed dead by the IDF. Twenty are believed to be alive and there are grave concerns for the well-being of two others, Israeli officials have said. Hamas is also holding the body of an IDF soldier killed in Gaza in 2014.
Hamas released 30 hostages — 20 Israeli civilians, five soldiers, and five Thai nationals — and the bodies of eight slain Israeli captives during a ceasefire between January and March, and one additional hostage, a dual American-Israeli citizen, in May as a “gesture” to the United States. The terror group freed 105 civilians during a weeklong truce in late November 2023, and four hostages were released before that in the early weeks of the war. In exchange, Israel has freed some 2,000 jailed Palestinian terrorists, security prisoners, and Gazan terror suspects detained during the war.
Eight hostages have been rescued from captivity by troops alive, and the bodies of 49 have also been recovered, including three mistakenly killed by the Israeli military as they tried to escape their captors, and the body of a soldier who was killed in 2014.