The discovery of six dead hostages has caused anger and horror and reignited protests against the government in Israel. However, it is questionable whether this will persuade Netanyahu to give in.
After the bodies of six hostages were found in the Gaza Strip, pressure on Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in Israel has increased massively. A major protest strike and the largest mass protests in Tel Aviv since the war began were intended to persuade Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to make a deal with the Islamist Hamas to release the remaining hostages. Supporters of the government criticized the protest movement for playing into the hands of the terrorist organization Hamas and only encouraging it to maintain a tough negotiating position. A labor court ordered an early end to the strike on Monday afternoon because it was politically motivated.
The Israeli army announced on Sunday morning that the bodies of six hostages had been discovered in an underground tunnel in the south of the Gaza Strip. According to media reports, the Israeli Health Ministry said that the hostages had been shot at close range about 48 to 72 hours before the autopsy of the bodies. A Hamas spokesman, however, said that the hostages had died as a result of Israeli bombardment.
Killed hostage had German family
A spokesman for the Foreign Office called the murder of six other Hamas hostages “almost unbearable”. Among them was a “person with a German family”. When asked, it was said that the person was not a German citizen, but that the family had ties to Germany. The sister-in-law of the killed hostage Carmel Gat has both Israeli and German citizenship. Yarden Romann-Gat was released by Hamas at the end of November as part of an agreement with the Israeli government.
Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz announced a harsh response following the death of the six hostages. “The terrorist organization Hamas has brutally executed six hostages to sow fear and try to divide Israeli society,” Katz wrote on X. “Israel will respond to this shameful crime with full force. Hamas is responsible and will pay the full price.”
Airport operations disrupted
In protest against the slow progress of negotiations on the release of 101 remaining hostages, employees of many organizations and authorities went on strike. Many cities and municipalities joined the protest, others refused because they are more close to the government.
According to media reports, there were disruptions and delays in air traffic at Ben Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv, although the airport authority had announced that everything was going according to plan.
However, an Israeli labor court ordered the union umbrella organization to end the nationwide protest strike, which was supposed to last 24 hours, at 2:30 p.m. local time (1:30 p.m. CEST). Judge Hadas Jahalom issued a corresponding temporary injunction, Israeli media reported unanimously. She explained that it was a “political strike” as the reason. She followed a request from Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. Smotrich, like the right-wing extremist Police Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, rejects concessions to Hamas and has repeatedly threatened Prime Minister Netanyahu with the collapse of the government.
Clashes in Tel Aviv
In the largest mass protests since the start of the Gaza war almost eleven months ago, demonstrators demanded an immediate agreement on Sunday evening. In Tel Aviv and other cities, there were clashes with the police during the night. According to police, 29 people were arrested.
Participants in the protest blocked a central highway in the evening. According to media reports, they threw stones, fences, nails and metal objects onto the road, lit a fire and shot fireworks into the air. The police eventually cleared the road and used stun grenades.
“We will not abandon them,” chanted demonstrators in Tel Aviv, referring to the fate of the hostages still held by the Islamists. They marched with blue and white national flags on the city’s central streets. The coffins of the six dead hostages were symbolically laid out on a stage.
Negotiations are at a standstill
The indirect negotiations between Israel and Hamas, in which Qatar and Egypt are acting as mediators alongside the United States, have not made any progress for months.
According to information from the Washington Post, the mediators want to present a proposal for an agreement to the conflicting parties one last time in the coming weeks. If both sides do not accept this again, it could mean the end of the negotiations, a senior official in the administration of US President Joe Biden was quoted as saying. The discovery of the dead hostages in Gaza has shown the urgency of an agreement.
The main point of contention in the negotiations is currently the question of how long Israeli troops can remain stationed in the Philadelphia Corridor in southern Gaza on the border with Egypt. Israel’s security cabinet recently decided to maintain control of the corridor. In a statement by the relatives of the abducted people, it was said that Netanyahu and his coalition partners had decided to “torpedo the ceasefire agreement for the corridor and are thereby knowingly condemning the hostages to death.”
Polio vaccination campaign for children underway
Following the start of a vaccination campaign in the Gaza Strip, more than 72,000 children have already been vaccinated against the polio virus, according to the local health ministry. After the first case of polio in 25 years was recently reported in the contested coastal strip, around 640,000 children are to be immunized against the highly contagious virus, according to the WHO. Two doses of the vaccine are usually administered four weeks apart.
During the vaccination campaign that began on Sunday, which will last a good week and is to be extended to other parts of Gaza, Israel’s army said it wanted to observe temporary and localized breaks in fighting.
The Gaza war was triggered by the worst massacre in Israel’s history, with more than 1,200 deaths, which terrorists from Hamas and other extremist groups carried out in the Israeli border region on October 7 last year. Since then, the number of Palestinians killed in the war in Gaza has risen to more than 40,700, according to the health authority in the coastal region, which is controlled by Hamas. The number does not distinguish between fighters and civilians and is difficult to verify.
Source: Stern
I have been working in the news industry for over 6 years, first as a reporter and now as an editor. I have covered politics extensively, and my work has appeared in major newspapers and online news outlets around the world. In addition to my writing, I also contribute regularly to 24 Hours World.
