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9 September 2024

Grief and Fury in Israel

Ruth Margalit

The news that the bodies of six young hostages had been found in an underground tunnel in Gaza, after eleven months of war, sent hundreds of thousands of Israelis out on Sunday evening, in one of the largest protests in the country’s history. By nighttime, Israel’s largest labor union had declared a rare general strike. Even Ben Gurion Airport shut down for several hours. The marches continued on Monday, and there is no telling when they will ebb. The nation seems once more at a breaking point.

It wasn’t the first time that several of the roughly two hundred and fifty hostages seized by Hamas terrorists on October 7th had been killed. Just this June, four other hostages were pronounced dead, including two over the age of eighty; their bodies are still being held in Gaza. I went to the vigils that followed those deaths. They were sizable, charged, and emotional—but nowhere near the outpouring of public fury unleashed this time around.

Perhaps the difference was that the killing of the six hostages by Hamas appeared to many Israelis to have been preventable. The Army has confirmed that all six—ranging in age from twenty-three to forty—were alive until just a few days ago, possibly as late as last Friday. According to the Israeli authorities, they were executed by their captors at short range. That knowledge, combined with reports that Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, had insisted on adding demands to a proposed ceasefire deal that would have seen the hostages’ release, fuelled the public outcry. Three of the slain hostages had been expected to be freed in the deal’s first phase.

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