Netanyahu up against a wall as domestic pressure grows for a hostage deal

The Israeli prime minister has lashed out calling the international community ignorant and anti-semitic for criticizing the Israeli genocide of Gaza and has reiterated possibility of ground offensive in Rafah

April 01, 2024 by Peoples Dispatch
Posters in Tel Aviv calling for the return of Israeli hostages in Gaza. Photo: Wikimedia commons

After almost six months of war in Gaza wherein Israeli forces have killed close to 33,000 Palestinians and wounded over 75,000, thousands of Israeli citizens took to the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem on Sunday March 31 to demand a ceasefire and a hostage deal. The Israeli protesters have blamed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the failure so far to reach a deal and called for fresh elections in the country.

Israeli media called Sunday’s protest the largest since October 7 and indicative of growing popular resentment against the government which is considered as the most extremist in the history of Israel.

Protesters shouted slogans against Netanyahu blaming him for dragging the war in order to avoid elections in the country and stay in power. They demanded his immediate resignation with some even calling him “crime minister.”

Israeli security forces attacked the protesters with tear gas and water cannons and even arrested some of them in order to prevent them from erecting tents outside the Israeli parliament building where they plan to stay put for four days.

Opposition leaders such as Yair Lapid and others addressed the protesters. They claimed that Netanyahu does not want the hostage crisis to resolve or the war to end as it provides him an opportunity to stay in power despite popular resentment over corruption and inefficiency.

Lapid criticized Netanyahu for only being worried about his political future and for not thinking about the future of the country or the hostages. Lapid claimed that the country is paralyzed and elections are necessary to re-energize it.

Similar protests were taken out in Tel Aviv as well. The protests in Tel Aviv started a day earlier than Jerusalem. Protesters in front of Israel’s ministry of defense in the city asked the government to send its delegates to Qatar to finalize the hostage deal, blaming Netanyahu for having hampered the deal with Hamas.

Some protesters also believe that the resignation of Netanyahu would expedite the hostage deal.

However, Netanyahu remained defiant. In a televised press conference on Sunday he called all the international criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza as a result of “a combination of ignorance and anti-semitism.”

The Netanyahu government has been refusing to stop the war despite that the UN Security Council, after delaying for months, adopted a ceasefire resolution. Israeli delegations have left the ceasefire talks in Egypt and Doha multiple times in the last few weeks, with Netanyahu often claiming that the Palestinian demand for a permanent ceasefire is “unrealistic.”

Netanyahu repeated that Israeli forces will move into Rafah in a ground offensive soon. Most countries, including the United States, international bodies, and humanitarian organizations have opposed any ground offensive to Rafah where more than half of Gaza’s total population of 2.3 million is now taking shelter. The UN claims a ground offensive on such a densely populated enclave would be disastrous.

Netanyahu also rejected calls for early elections in the country claiming that would paralyze the country amidst the war.

The protests, to some extent, are the revival of the protests in the first half of last year which were organized to oppose the so-called judicial reform introduced by the Netanyahu government. Those protests were suspended after the beginning of the war in Gaza.