The Hostages and Missing Families Forum was set to hold its weekly rally at Tel Aviv’s Hostages Square on Saturday evening, while protest groups calling on the government to resign will demonstrate nearby.
The protest will come after the forum welcomed United States President Joe Biden’s speech Friday detailing what he said was an Israeli proposal for the release of hostages held by Hamas and to the end the war sparked by the Gaza-ruling terror group’s October 7 onslaught.
The group’s weekly Tel Aviv rally, set to begin at 8 p.m, will highlight the hostage families’ younger generation while urging the government to pursue a deal for the release of the hostages taken by Hamas on October 7.
The rally will be complemented by another nearby demonstration calling for snap elections and the government’s resignation.
Groups participating in the demonstration formed the backbone of 2023’s weekly rallies against the government’s proposed judicial overhaul. They will gather at 8:30 p.m. outside the Kirya military headquarters’ eastern entrance, on Begin Street.
At least one of the groups, the left-wing “Bloc Against the Occupation,” will hold a protest at 7 p.m. outside the Kirya’s southern entrance, on Kaplan Street, before joining the Begin Street rally.
Saturday’s protests will be held as tensions between the hostage families and the government have continued to intensify.
On Friday, the Families Forum accused the government of “sacrificing” their loved ones, after a heated meeting attended between some of the families a day earlier in which National Security Adviser Tzachi Hanegbi reportedly said Israel would not end the war in Gaza for a deal to save all the abductees.
The Families Forum also panned Likud MK Hanoch Milwidsky, who accused the brother of hostage Itzik Elgarat of using his suffering to promote an anti-government agenda. Mildwisky later apologized.
Also on Friday, hostage Noa Argamani, 26, whom Hamas snatched from the Nova music festival, was heard in a propaganda video released by Hamas on Friday urging Israelis to “go out to the streets to demonstrate, shut down the streets of Tel Aviv and don’t come home until we return.”
In a statement, the Hostages and Missing Families Forum said that the images seen in the video featuring Argamani’s voice were believed by her family to be her.
“Don’t let [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu and the government kill us,” Argamani said in the video. ” Save us, time is running out, the people must decide. We don’t want to die here.”
On Thursday, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror group released a second propaganda video showing hostage Alexander (Sasha) Trufanov, 30, providing apparent proof that the footage was filmed recently.
The war in Gaza erupted after Hamas’s October 7 massacre, which saw some 3,000 terrorists burst across the border into Israel by land, air and sea, killing some 1,200 people and seizing 252 hostages, mostly civilians, many amid acts of brutality and sexual assault.
It is believed that 121 hostages abducted by Hamas on October 7 remain in Gaza — not all of them alive. Hamas is also believed to have been holding the bodies of two fallen IDF soldiers since 2014, as well as two Israeli civilians who are both thought to be alive after entering the Strip of their own accord in 2014 and 2015 respectively.