Hundreds of anti-government protesters are gathered outside the President’s Residence in Jerusalem for the tenth week in a row demanding new elections.
Tova, an organizer with the protest group Safeguarding our Shared Home, is demanding the government “return its mandate to the people” and call another round of elections.
“Wherever you look, there is chaos,” she says. “This is a result of policy, in fact, the chaos is the policy.”
Screenwriter and reservist Benny Barabash, who took to the stage after her, is deriding the government for painting anti-overhaul protesters as the enemy rather than Hamas, Iran and Hezbollah.
“Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, is the leader, and is therefore guilty,” he says, before lambasting government conduct in a plethora of areas, including relations with the United States and its alleged abandonment of the Gaza Envelope communities devastated by Hamas’s October 7 assault.
“The choice of life or death is before us, the choice of a blessing or curse, and like the choice is in our hands,” he shouts to the crowd. “Elections now, despite the war, elections now, because of the war.”
Ultra-Orthodox rabbi Bezalel Cohen, founder of the Chachmei Lev Yeshiva, calls for Haredi leadership to begin encouraging their community to enlist to “defend the people and the country, out of a sense of partnership and brotherhood.”
Cohen is giving his speech in the wake of the government’s sidelining of a plan for Haredi enlistment, presented last month by war cabinet members Benny Gantz and Gadi Eizenkot.
Protesters are now beginning to march to Paris Square, where they will hear speeches from family members of Hamas-held hostages.
