15 arrested in Tel Aviv as hostage deal protest again merge with anti-government groups, drawing hundreds of thousands of attendees; hostage families react to ‘horrific’ video from Gaza tunnel
By Noam Lehmann, Iddo Schejter and ToI Staff
15 September 2024
Protesters against the government and for a hostage deal rally on Tel Aviv's Begin Road, September 14, 2024. (Erik Marmor/Flash90)
The mother of an abducted Israeli soldier played an audio clip of her son addressing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from his captivity in Gaza at a weekly protest in Tel Aviv on Saturday evening, as hundreds of thousands of people gathered at multiple locations across the country to demonstrate against the government and call for a hostage release-ceasefire deal.
The audio clip of Matan Angrest, roughly 30 seconds in length, was the first public sign of life from him since he was abducted from the Nahal Oz military base on the morning of October 7.
In the recording, which the Hostages and Missing Families Forum said was recently obtained in Gaza, Angrest used terminology highly likely to have been dictated by his Hamas captors, and referred to himself and his fellow hostages as “prisoners.”
“Netanyahu,” he said in the clip, “you must, must do this exchange between the [Palestinian] prisoners in Israel and the prisoners here. I very much want to see my family and friends, it’s very important. I think you’re capable of it. I trust you.”
His mother Anat Angrest chose to play the recording at the weekly rally in Tel Aviv to drive home her demand for a deal to secure the release of the 101 hostages still captive in Gaza.
She played the clip of her son after her own address to the prime minister.
“Bibi,” she began, drawing boos from the audience at the mention of the premier’s nickname, “I thought that maybe after a year you could help me answer my children.”
“Mom, is Matan eating?” she said, quoting her conversations with her children. “Mom, do you still believe Matan will come back?”
“And the most important question: who are Ben Gvir and Smotrich?” she added, referring to far-right ministers Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who harshly oppose what they term a “surrender deal.”
Angrest charged that her son hasn’t come back yet due to the two “crazies.”
Anat Angrest, mother of captive soldier Matan Angrest, speaks at a rally against the government and for ahostage deal, September 14, 2024. (Paulina Patimer/Hostages and Missing Families Forum)
Following Angrest, Einav Zangauker, mother of hostage Matan Zangauker, addressed the crowds in Tel Aviv, charging that her son was snatched, and is help captive still, by none other than Netanyahu, “a single lying leader.”
She repeated her weeks-old statement that Mossad chief David Barnea had told her that “in the current political constellation there is no chance for a deal” — a claim denied by the spy chief.
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“Deny as much as you want,” Zangauker said.
Einav Zangauker, whose son Matan Zangauker is held hostage by the Hamas terror group in Gaza, speaks at a press conference with other hostages’ loved ones in Tel Aviv on September 14, 2024. (Avshalom Sassoni/Flash90)
While Barnea has denied the statement, other defense officials have been said to express similar sentiments in recent weeks, including, according to Channel 12, IDF Chief of Staff Lt Gen Herzi Halevi. According to the television network, the IDF chief told parents of captive soldiers, both living and dead, that he was “not sure there will be anyone to bring home” as time passes and a deal remains elusive.
He said he had underlined his concern to the “political echelon,” where, despite widespread criticism for not making more concessions in pursuit of a deal to bring about the release of the hostages, Netanyahu has continued to insist that he will not agree to withdraw Israeli troops from the Philadelphi Corridor along the Gaza-Egypt border.
‘101 Ron Arads’
Earlier on Saturday, at a press conference ahead of the demonstration, Zangauker alleged that the reason Netanahy had recently signaled a shift in military focus from Gaza to the northern border and Hezbollah was because he had decided to “abandon the hostages to die in the tunnels.”
Instead of returning the hostages, Netanyahu is giving the country “101 Ron Arads,” Zangauker said, referring to an Israeli Air Force officer who was captured in 1986 by Lebanese terrorists and has since disappeared and is classified as missing in action.
Israelis calling for a hostage-ceasefire deal to secure the release of remaining captives held by the Hamas terror group in Gaza protest in Tel Aviv, September 14, 2024. (Erik Marmor/Flash90)
Demonstrations calling for a hostage deal have taken place on a near-weekly basis following the October 7, 2023, Hamas terror onslaught, when thousands of terrorists invaded southern Israel from the Gaza Strip, killing some 1,200 people, taking 251 hostages and sparking the war with Israel inside the Palestinian enclave.
The protests surged in numbers at the start of September, following the recovery from a tunnel in southern Gaza of the bodies of six murdered hostages, who autopsies revealed had been shot by their captors just days before Israeli soldiers reached them.
In Tel Aviv last week, the hostage deal rally and the anti-government protest merged for the first time, drawing what organizers claimed was roughly half a million people — making it the largest protest in Israeli history.
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The two demonstrations merged once more on Saturday, and the joint Tel Aviv rally lasted several hours before dispersing — mostly peacefully — at around 11 p.m.
The police said, however, that 15 people had been arrested for disturbing public order after they attempted to block the Ayalon freeway by lighting bonfires in the middle of the road.
Natalie Zangauker, sister of hostage Matan Zangauker, at the end of an anti-government, pro-hostage deal rally on Begin Road in Tel Aviv, September 14, 2024. (Gil Levin/Pro-Democracy Protest Movement)
Accompanying the mainstream protest, various left-wing groups were dotted around near the Kaplan-Begin interchange throughout the protest, demanding an end to the IDF’s campaign in the Gaza Strip.
A 20-strong group called on Israelis to refuse military service as they waved flags of the far-left Antifa movement and hoisted a banner of Hadash, an Arab-Jewish communist party. Nearby, a woman wore a sign assailing protesters for ignoring the “criminal killing in the West Bank and Gaza,” and a man lay in a pool of mock blood next to a rubber mask of Netanyahu.
“Tomatoes cost NIS 22.90 [$6], but blood is free,” read a sign on the installation.
Protesters wave Antifa flags and hoist a @hadash banner on the outskirts of Tel Aviv's pro-hostage deal rally.
'Soldier – attention! Refusal is an option!'
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The banner reads: 'In Gaza and Sderot, children want to live.' pic.twitter.com/dlsmNyuz7j
— Noam Lehmann (@noamlehmann) September 14, 2024
Toward the end of the evening, young right-wing agitators clashed with some protesters who remained even as the event dispersed.
Officers attempted to chase away the band of youths, although no arrests were made as they appeared at the end of the rally to taunt and clash with the few remaining protesters, ripping down posters in their wake.
Passing a stang offering free water to protesters, a pair shouted “For leftists it’s with cyanide.”
Meanwhile a group of some 20 agitators stole a shirt from an anti-government vendor. Pushed off the main road to Kaplan Street, they then attempted to light the shirt on fire until police forces appeared to once more chase them off.
Raz Ben Ami, wife of hostage Ohad Ben Ami and a former hostage herself, speaks at a rally against the government and for ahostage deal, September 14, 2024. (Paulina Patimer/Hostages and Missing Families Forum)
Along with Angrest and Zangauker, the rally featured speeches from Michal Lobanov, wife of Alex Lobanov, one of the six hostages executed by Hamas two weeks ago; Raz Ben Ami, wife of hostage Ohad Ben Ami who was herself released from captivity in the November ceasefire; friends of hostages Gali and Ziv Berman, identified only as Sapir and Iddo; and, via video message, celebrated educator Adina Bar-Shalom, daughter of the late former chief rabbi and Shas party spiritual leader Ovadia Yosef.
Bar-Shalom, who has publicly criticized her late father’s party for failing to press for a deal, said that she was raised to place human life before all else.
“Anyone who saves a soul from Israel — it’s as though they upheld an entire world,’” she quoted the Talmud. “Do we have to put these values aside?” she asked. “What makes us Jewish?”
Urging concessions as part of a hostage deal, she implored the government not to “think what will come later. The certainty of now trumps any future worries.”
Bar-Shalom’s brother Yitzhak Yosef — until recently Israel’s Sephardic chief rabbi— has also publicly called for far-reaching concessions to secure the hostages’ immediate release.
Michal Lobanov, who was pregnant when her husband Alex was kidnapped from the Supernova music festival, told the crowd in Tel Aviv that her “heart was murdered in Gaza.”
“They will stay, forever and eternally, several meters underground,” she said of the hostages.
Of her son Kai, who she said looks like a “copy of dad,” she questioned: “Will he ever feel safe without his father?”
Taking to the stage, Raz Ben Ami said that when she was released from captivity in November, she already knew that if the hostages “don’t come back now, they’ll come back in coffins.”
“In the meantime I was right,” she said. “I’m sick of the military pressure, which so far has only killed them.”
Iddo and Sapir, friends of Gali and Ziv Berman who were abducted from the southern Kibbutz Kfar Aza, noted that the twin captives turned 27 this week.
“Do they even know they had a birthday this week?” asked Iddo, pleading for them to “Be strong. A little more and you’re home.”
Addressing the government, he said that it had “no moral right to continue abandoning them.”
Israelis calling for a hostage-ceasefire deal to secure the release of remaining captives held by the Hamas terror group in Gaza protest in Tel Aviv, September 14, 2024. (Avshalom Sassoni/Flash90)
At a parallel protest in Jerusalem Saturday night, Eyal Calderon, cousin of hostage Ofer Calderon, chastised the government over a video released by the IDF last week showing the tunnel in which the six hostages whose bodies were recovered earlier this month had been kept and executed.
Calderon recalled watching the “horror video,” and said that one day after the video was released, cabinet members told him in a private meeting that the Philadelphi Corridor is a strategic asset that must not be forfeited.
???????????????????????????????????? ????????????????????????????: IDF Spokesperson, RAdm. Daniel Hagari, reveals the underground terrorist tunnel where Hersh, Eden, Carmel, Ori, Alex and Almog were held in brutal conditions and murdered by Hamas. pic.twitter.com/edlfi4lR8U
— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) September 10, 2024
Omri Shtivi, brother of hostage Idan Shtivi, also spoke in Jerusalem. He addressed his captive brother, saying the government is not working for his release, because it wants to maintain the coalition. “Can you believe it?” Shtivi said.
The captive’s brother also addressed the government directly, saying: “Ask yourselves what’s reversible. Philadelphi is reversible; the life of a murdered hostage isn’t.”
As protesters marched to Paris Square in central Jerusalem, small skirmishes broke out between police and protesters, with police pushing the crowd toward the sidewalk and arresting at least one protester for allegedly violating the conditions of their probation.
Responding to police, protesters chanted, “Where were you in Sde Teiman?” referring to a riot in July in which an extremist crowd broke into a military detention facility, with little restraint after the arrest of several soldiers accused of sexually abusing a Palestinian terror suspect.
It is believed that 97 of the 251 hostages abducted by Hamas on October 7 remain in Gaza, including the bodies of at least 33 confirmed dead by the IDF.
Hamas is also holding two Israeli civilians who entered the Strip in 2014 and 2015, as well as the bodies of two IDF soldiers who were killed in 2014.
The terror group released 105 civilians during a weeklong truce in late November, and four hostages were released before that. Eight hostages have been rescued by troops alive, and the bodies of 37 hostages have also been recovered, including three mistakenly killed by the military as they tried to escape their captors.
The mother of an abducted Israeli soldier played an audio clip of her son addressing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from his captivity in Gaza at a weekly protest in Tel Aviv on Saturday evening, as hundreds of thousands of people gathered at multiple locations across the country to demonstrate against the government and call for a hostage release-ceasefire deal.
The audio clip of Matan Angrest, roughly 30 seconds in length, was the first public sign of life from him since he was abducted from the Nahal Oz military base on the morning of October 7.
In the recording, which the Hostages and Missing Families Forum said was recently obtained in Gaza, Angrest used terminology highly likely to have been dictated by his Hamas captors, and referred to himself and his fellow hostages as “prisoners.”
“Netanyahu,” he said in the clip, “you must, must do this exchange between the [Palestinian] prisoners in Israel and the prisoners here. I very much want to see my family and friends, it’s very important. I think you’re capable of it. I trust you.”
His mother Anat Angrest chose to play the recording at the weekly rally in Tel Aviv to drive home her demand for a deal to secure the release of the 101 hostages still captive in Gaza.
She played the clip of her son after her own address to the prime minister.
“Bibi,” she began, drawing boos from the audience at the mention of the premier’s nickname, “I thought that maybe after a year you could help me answer my children.”
“Mom, is Matan eating?” she said, quoting her conversations with her children. “Mom, do you still believe Matan will come back?”
“And the most important question: who are Ben Gvir and Smotrich?” she added, referring to far-right ministers Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who harshly oppose what they term a “surrender deal.”
Angrest charged that her son hasn’t come back yet due to the two “crazies.”
Anat Angrest, mother of captive soldier Matan Angrest, speaks at a rally against the government and for ahostage deal, September 14, 2024. (Paulina Patimer/Hostages and Missing Families Forum)
Following Angrest, Einav Zangauker, mother of hostage Matan Zangauker, addressed the crowds in Tel Aviv, charging that her son was snatched, and is help captive still, by none other than Netanyahu, “a single lying leader.”
She repeated her weeks-old statement that Mossad chief David Barnea had told her that “in the current political constellation there is no chance for a deal” — a claim denied by the spy chief.
Advertisement
“Deny as much as you want,” Zangauker said.
Einav Zangauker, whose son Matan Zangauker is held hostage by the Hamas terror group in Gaza, speaks at a press conference with other hostages’ loved ones in Tel Aviv on September 14, 2024. (Avshalom Sassoni/Flash90)
While Barnea has denied the statement, other defense officials have been said to express similar sentiments in recent weeks, including, according to Channel 12, IDF Chief of Staff Lt Gen Herzi Halevi. According to the television network, the IDF chief told parents of captive soldiers, both living and dead, that he was “not sure there will be anyone to bring home” as time passes and a deal remains elusive.
He said he had underlined his concern to the “political echelon,” where, despite widespread criticism for not making more concessions in pursuit of a deal to bring about the release of the hostages, Netanyahu has continued to insist that he will not agree to withdraw Israeli troops from the Philadelphi Corridor along the Gaza-Egypt border.
‘101 Ron Arads’
Earlier on Saturday, at a press conference ahead of the demonstration, Zangauker alleged that the reason Netanahy had recently signaled a shift in military focus from Gaza to the northern border and Hezbollah was because he had decided to “abandon the hostages to die in the tunnels.”
Instead of returning the hostages, Netanyahu is giving the country “101 Ron Arads,” Zangauker said, referring to an Israeli Air Force officer who was captured in 1986 by Lebanese terrorists and has since disappeared and is classified as missing in action.
Israelis calling for a hostage-ceasefire deal to secure the release of remaining captives held by the Hamas terror group in Gaza protest in Tel Aviv, September 14, 2024. (Erik Marmor/Flash90)
Demonstrations calling for a hostage deal have taken place on a near-weekly basis following the October 7, 2023, Hamas terror onslaught, when thousands of terrorists invaded southern Israel from the Gaza Strip, killing some 1,200 people, taking 251 hostages and sparking the war with Israel inside the Palestinian enclave.
The protests surged in numbers at the start of September, following the recovery from a tunnel in southern Gaza of the bodies of six murdered hostages, who autopsies revealed had been shot by their captors just days before Israeli soldiers reached them.
In Tel Aviv last week, the hostage deal rally and the anti-government protest merged for the first time, drawing what organizers claimed was roughly half a million people — making it the largest protest in Israeli history.
Advertisement
The two demonstrations merged once more on Saturday, and the joint Tel Aviv rally lasted several hours before dispersing — mostly peacefully — at around 11 p.m.
The police said, however, that 15 people had been arrested for disturbing public order after they attempted to block the Ayalon freeway by lighting bonfires in the middle of the road.
Natalie Zangauker, sister of hostage Matan Zangauker, at the end of an anti-government, pro-hostage deal rally on Begin Road in Tel Aviv, September 14, 2024. (Gil Levin/Pro-Democracy Protest Movement)
Accompanying the mainstream protest, various left-wing groups were dotted around near the Kaplan-Begin interchange throughout the protest, demanding an end to the IDF’s campaign in the Gaza Strip.
A 20-strong group called on Israelis to refuse military service as they waved flags of the far-left Antifa movement and hoisted a banner of Hadash, an Arab-Jewish communist party. Nearby, a woman wore a sign assailing protesters for ignoring the “criminal killing in the West Bank and Gaza,” and a man lay in a pool of mock blood next to a rubber mask of Netanyahu.
“Tomatoes cost NIS 22.90 [$6], but blood is free,” read a sign on the installation.
Protesters wave Antifa flags and hoist a @hadash banner on the outskirts of Tel Aviv's pro-hostage deal rally.
'Soldier – attention! Refusal is an option!'
Advertisement
The banner reads: 'In Gaza and Sderot, children want to live.' pic.twitter.com/dlsmNyuz7j
— Noam Lehmann (@noamlehmann) September 14, 2024
Toward the end of the evening, young right-wing agitators clashed with some protesters who remained even as the event dispersed.
Officers attempted to chase away the band of youths, although no arrests were made as they appeared at the end of the rally to taunt and clash with the few remaining protesters, ripping down posters in their wake.
Passing a stang offering free water to protesters, a pair shouted “For leftists it’s with cyanide.”
Meanwhile a group of some 20 agitators stole a shirt from an anti-government vendor. Pushed off the main road to Kaplan Street, they then attempted to light the shirt on fire until police forces appeared to once more chase them off.
Raz Ben Ami, wife of hostage Ohad Ben Ami and a former hostage herself, speaks at a rally against the government and for ahostage deal, September 14, 2024. (Paulina Patimer/Hostages and Missing Families Forum)
Along with Angrest and Zangauker, the rally featured speeches from Michal Lobanov, wife of Alex Lobanov, one of the six hostages executed by Hamas two weeks ago; Raz Ben Ami, wife of hostage Ohad Ben Ami who was herself released from captivity in the November ceasefire; friends of hostages Gali and Ziv Berman, identified only as Sapir and Iddo; and, via video message, celebrated educator Adina Bar-Shalom, daughter of the late former chief rabbi and Shas party spiritual leader Ovadia Yosef.
Bar-Shalom, who has publicly criticized her late father’s party for failing to press for a deal, said that she was raised to place human life before all else.
“Anyone who saves a soul from Israel — it’s as though they upheld an entire world,’” she quoted the Talmud. “Do we have to put these values aside?” she asked. “What makes us Jewish?”
Urging concessions as part of a hostage deal, she implored the government not to “think what will come later. The certainty of now trumps any future worries.”
Bar-Shalom’s brother Yitzhak Yosef — until recently Israel’s Sephardic chief rabbi— has also publicly called for far-reaching concessions to secure the hostages’ immediate release.
Michal Lobanov, who was pregnant when her husband Alex was kidnapped from the Supernova music festival, told the crowd in Tel Aviv that her “heart was murdered in Gaza.”
“They will stay, forever and eternally, several meters underground,” she said of the hostages.
Of her son Kai, who she said looks like a “copy of dad,” she questioned: “Will he ever feel safe without his father?”
Taking to the stage, Raz Ben Ami said that when she was released from captivity in November, she already knew that if the hostages “don’t come back now, they’ll come back in coffins.”
“In the meantime I was right,” she said. “I’m sick of the military pressure, which so far has only killed them.”
Iddo and Sapir, friends of Gali and Ziv Berman who were abducted from the southern Kibbutz Kfar Aza, noted that the twin captives turned 27 this week.
“Do they even know they had a birthday this week?” asked Iddo, pleading for them to “Be strong. A little more and you’re home.”
Addressing the government, he said that it had “no moral right to continue abandoning them.”
Israelis calling for a hostage-ceasefire deal to secure the release of remaining captives held by the Hamas terror group in Gaza protest in Tel Aviv, September 14, 2024. (Avshalom Sassoni/Flash90)
At a parallel protest in Jerusalem Saturday night, Eyal Calderon, cousin of hostage Ofer Calderon, chastised the government over a video released by the IDF last week showing the tunnel in which the six hostages whose bodies were recovered earlier this month had been kept and executed.
Calderon recalled watching the “horror video,” and said that one day after the video was released, cabinet members told him in a private meeting that the Philadelphi Corridor is a strategic asset that must not be forfeited.
???????????????????????????????????? ????????????????????????????: IDF Spokesperson, RAdm. Daniel Hagari, reveals the underground terrorist tunnel where Hersh, Eden, Carmel, Ori, Alex and Almog were held in brutal conditions and murdered by Hamas. pic.twitter.com/edlfi4lR8U
— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) September 10, 2024
Omri Shtivi, brother of hostage Idan Shtivi, also spoke in Jerusalem. He addressed his captive brother, saying the government is not working for his release, because it wants to maintain the coalition. “Can you believe it?” Shtivi said.
The captive’s brother also addressed the government directly, saying: “Ask yourselves what’s reversible. Philadelphi is reversible; the life of a murdered hostage isn’t.”
As protesters marched to Paris Square in central Jerusalem, small skirmishes broke out between police and protesters, with police pushing the crowd toward the sidewalk and arresting at least one protester for allegedly violating the conditions of their probation.
Responding to police, protesters chanted, “Where were you in Sde Teiman?” referring to a riot in July in which an extremist crowd broke into a military detention facility, with little restraint after the arrest of several soldiers accused of sexually abusing a Palestinian terror suspect.
It is believed that 97 of the 251 hostages abducted by Hamas on October 7 remain in Gaza, including the bodies of at least 33 confirmed dead by the IDF.
Hamas is also holding two Israeli civilians who entered the Strip in 2014 and 2015, as well as the bodies of two IDF soldiers who were killed in 2014.
The terror group released 105 civilians during a weeklong truce in late November, and four hostages were released before that. Eight hostages have been rescued by troops alive, and the bodies of 37 hostages have also been recovered, including three mistakenly killed by the military as they tried to escape their captors.
