Tens of thousands of protesters gathered near Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s residence in Jerusalem on Saturday evening for a rally organized by families of hostages held in Gaza, who charged that the premier was willingly sacrificing their loved ones in a bid to cling to power.
The mass demonstration — held in the capital, unlike the usual Tel Aviv in most weekly rallies — was organized in the shadow of the Israel Defense Forces’ plan to take over Gaza City, in the north of the Strip, where some of the remaining 48 hostages are believed to be held.
The military is forging ahead with the operation, at the orders of the government, despite widely-reported opposition from senior defense officials, who have assessed that the campaign could further endanger the lives of the hostages.
Protesters set out from the Chords Bridge, near the entrance to Jerusalem, toward Netanyahu’s residence on Azza Street, holding a banner reading, “Government of the shadow of death,” and chanting: “Why are they still in Gaza?”
As they walked, Ora Rubinstein, the aunt of Hamas hostage Bar Kuperstein, addressed Netanyahu directly, saying they were “not anarchists, we are not right-wingers, not left-wingers — we are families, and our demand is that you return all of them [the hostages], now.”
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Police flanked the marchers, and the road was closed for the procession. Officers had brought a water cannon to an intersection that the protesters passed through, but did not use it.
‘If something happens, you will pay’
Masses of people awaited the marchers at Paris Square, less than a kilometer (mile) from Netanyahu’s home, for the main protest of the evening.
There, the mothers of abducted IDF soldiers Matan Angrest and Nimrod Cohen addressed the crowd.
At the top of the address, Anat Angrest tore up her prepared remarks and instead told the crowd that defense officials had recently contacted her to explain the risks associated with the expanded IDF operation in Gaza City.
Thousands attend a rally at Hostage Square in Tel Aviv, calling for an end to the war and the release of all hostages, on September 6, 2025. (Avshalom Sassoni/FLASH90)
She said that she was informed that “the risk has already increased in recent days as a result of the IDF’s activities prior to the maneuver,” and was increasing with each passing day.
“The prime minister decided to implement the ‘Hannibal Protocol’ on my Matan, on all the hostages,” said Angrest. The controversial Hannibal Protocol is a military order officially repealed in 2016 that granted troops broad permission to do whatever was necessary to prevent the kidnapping of a fellow soldier, including actions that would potentially put their lives at risk.
“Mr. Prime Minister, as a father to children, you are separating me from Matan, Matan from his freedom, his life from his death!” cried Angrest.
“This is not a threat, Mr. Prime Minister. If something happens, you will pay for it — this is a mother’s word,” she warned Netanyahu.
Vicky Cohen, Nimrod’s mother, similarly cautioned the premier that if anything happened to her captive son, she would “make sure that you don’t have a minute of peace for the rest of your life.”
“Isn’t it enough for us that 42 hostages have already been murdered in captivity?” she said. “And what is the defense minister [Israel Katz], my Nimrod’s commander-in-chief, doing? Posting a one-sentence tweet on Twitter [X]: ‘We’ve started’” — referring to a tweet by Katz feting a strike on a Gaza City high-rise building.
“What exactly did you start?” inquired Cohen. “Adding another threat to the lives of the hostages who are barely living? What exactly are you proud of?”
Anat Angrest (L) and Vicky Cohen, the mothers of hostage soldiers Matan Angrest and Nimrod Cohen, speak at a rally near Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Jerusalem home, on September 6, 2025. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
She noted that there was “a full deal on the table” that would secure the release of every one of the 48 hostages, but that Netanyahu was refusing to sign off on it.
When “Hamas demanded a partial deal, he [Netanyahu] demanded a full deal,” Cohen said, “and when Hamas agreed to a full deal, he demands a partial one and ramps up this unnecessary and political war.”
In recent weeks, the government has adopted the position that it will only agree to a deal that frees all hostages, which would mean ending the war, while Hamas has said it would agree to a phased framework very similar to one previously accepted by Israel.
“My son can return home tomorrow morning alive and the prime minister is undermining this,” Cohen declared, as the crowd booed Netanyahu. “My child will not be sacrificed on the altar of politics.”
“If a hair on my Nimrod’s head is harmed, I will make sure you don’t have a minute of peace for the rest of your life,” she vowed. “My sensitive boy… I have no idea how he is coping in the hellfire of Gaza.”
Thousands attend a protest in Jerusalem calling for an end to the war and the release of all hostages from Hamas captivity on September 6, 2025. (Chaim Goldberg/FLASH90)
A legacy of ‘massacre and failure’
Einav Zangauker, whose son Matan is held hostage in Gaza, took to the stage as well, where she argued that Netanyahu was the worst enemy that the Jewish people have encountered.
“The Jewish people have had many persecutors throughout history,” said Zangauker. “Pharaoh, Haman, they carried out pogroms against us — but you, Benjamin Netanyahu, you rise above them all.”
“Seven-hundred-and-one days since Matan was kidnapped from his bed in Kibbutz Nir Oz straight into the jaws of Hamas,” she lamented, reflecting on the journey she has been on since, in her relentless fight to get him back.
“What didn’t I do?” she asked rhetorically. “I sat quietly for three months because they told us to shut up, they used scare tactics, ‘be quiet, it will be over soon.’ It didn’t help.”
“I sat at Begin Gate in Tel Aviv together with the other families of the hostages. We demanded and shouted, ‘Bring them home now.’ We marched in the scorching sun to Jerusalem, climbed on cages, gave media interviews, spoke abroad, we did everything — and they didn’t come back.”
Netanyahu, she charged, is “the father of the partial deals and ‘selektzia‘ doctrine,” — referring to the Nazis’ practice of separating family members from each other and sending some to their immediate death — “the father of the subversion, division and incitement doctrine, the father of the abandonment and sacrifice doctrine.”
She asserted that the premier’s loyalists were “leaking classified documents in violation of the law, inciting against us, against the citizens of the country, burning every good part of the country, and of democracy, and for what? So that the October 7 massacre will not stick to him.”
“Netanyahu, your only legacy is the massacre and failure of October 7,” Zangauker told the premier. “But your lies will not stop us.”
Einav Zangauker, the mother of Hamas hostage Matan Zangauker, speaks at a rally near Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Jerusalem home, on September 6, 2025. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
At one point, parts of the massive crowd began to chant against Netanyahu, calling him a “traitor,” before Zangauker picked her speech back up.
“My Matan is doing everything he can to survive in the Hamas tunnels; he is your legacy of abandonment,” she shouted. “Why haven’t you replied to Hamas’s response for three weeks? Why are you sending [Strategic Affairs Minister Ron] Dermer to lie to [US] President [Donald] Trump?”
Earlier in the evening, Matan Zangauker’s partner, Ilana Gritzewsky, herself a former hostage, spoke about his absence at a weekly rally in Hostages Square, in Tel Aviv.
“Matan, I miss you,” she said frankly. “I miss our cream pasta, I miss walks with our dog, our laughter, Friday night dinners and hanging out together, getting up early in the morning and ending each day with a hug. I miss my best friend.”
She said she “still lives in captivity,” and can envision Matan languishing away.
“I see him hungry, thirsty, weak,” she said. “I wonder if he remembers what I sound, feel and look like.”
Gritzewsky accused Netanyahu of prolonging the hostages’ captivity for political reasons.
“While Matan and the hostages waste away in the dark, the prime minister hangs on to his seat,” she said. “The enemy abducted us, but the ones holding us there for 701 extra days are you, the decision-makers.”
“You didn’t do everything. You didn’t do enough, because had you done, they would have already been here,” she said, adding that “the government has betrayed its citizens.”
Relatives and supporters of hostages held in the Gaza Strip attend a rally demanding their release from Hamas captivity and calling for an end to the war, in Jerusalem, September 6, 2025. (AP/Mahmoud Illean)
Thousands packed into Hostages Square and the adjacent Shaul HaMelech Road for the weekly rally, which took place before the night’s main protest in Jerusalem, and to listen to former hostages and the families of those still in Gaza.
In the middle of the square, rally-goers unfurled a large banner addressed to Trump, which appealed for him to “Save the hostages now!”
The relatives of slain hostages also spoke at the rally, expressing anger over the planned takeover of Gaza City, and recounting their loved ones’ final moments.
“The cabinet has decided to take over Gaza… without planning how to avoid murdering the hostages,” said Orna Neutra, the mother of slain captive soldier Omer Neutra. “Whoever doesn’t give answers today will bear an eternal mark of shame.”
Speaking after Neutra, Boaz Zalmanovich told the protesters that he recently saw close footage of his 86-year-old father, slain hostage Aryeh Zalmanovich, being driven to Gaza by his Hamas captors during the terror onslaught of October 7, 2023.
“Two weeks ago, I saw a video filmed by one of the murderers on that horrible day that has gone on for 701 days already,” he said. “The recording is from up close, every detail is visible — the bandage on my dad’s head covering the wound that opened up… the blood dripping on his beard, his frightened eyes watching with horror, and his weak hands trying to hang on to the back of the scoundrel sitting in front of him.”
“My father was abandoned on the morning of October 7 and suffered horribly for 40 days before he died,” said Zalmanovich. “And the Israeli government, which prioritizes land over people, which prioritizes vengeance over mercy, did not come to the rescue.”
“For 701 days, the abandonment monster has eaten away at everything here,” he says. “But the cruel government chooses to keep bloodletting instead of ending the war and returning the captives.”
Thousands attend a protest march in Jerusalem calling for an end to the war and the release of all hostages, September 6, 2025. (Yonatan Sindel/FLASH90)
Ofir Sharabi, the daughter of slain captive Yossi Sharabi, expressed fear that the new Gaza City offensive would make her father’s body and the remains of other slain captives irretrievable.
In February 2024, the IDF said Sharabi was likely inadvertently killed as a result of an Israeli strike.
“My father was murdered because of the military pressure that was brought to bear near the home where he was being held — but we need to beg for him to be brought back for burial?” she said. “The decision to conquer Gaza City means the murder and disappearance of the hostages.”
The Hostages Square rally ended with Ofir’s sister Yuval singing Hatikva, the national anthem.
While in previous weeks, rallygoers would often file out of Hostages Square to join up with the overtly political anti-government hostage deal protest on nearby Begin Street, the hostages’ families who organized those protests announced last month that they would stop them for the time being, in order to consolidate the campaign for the captives’ release.
This meant that Begin Road was all but empty except for several dozen left-wing protesters who previously stood on the fringes of the anti-government rally, bearing signs and chanting slogans accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza.
About 20 police officers were stationed next to them, and they escorted away a small band of right-wing youth who walked by, cursing at the protesters.
Fears of hostages being moved into Gaza City
Even as the families of the hostages begged for their loved ones to be kept safe in the face of the looming IDF offensive in Gaza City, Channel 12 news reported on Saturday night that the families of Alon Ohel and Guy Gilboa-Dalal, who appear in a video Hamas released Friday, believe the two were recently moved there, based on information from former hostages who were held with them.
A picture shows a view of a makeshift displacement camp at the Yarmuk Sports Stadium, once a football arena, as smoke billows during Israeli strikes on Gaza City on September 4, 2025. (Omar AL-QATTAA / AFP)
According to the report, there are concerns that other hostages have also been moved to Gaza City, ostensibly to put them in harm’s way or dissuade Israel from going ahead with the plan.
According to the channel, IDF chief Eyal Zamir, despite his opposition to the operation, has determined the order to conquer the city is lawful and therefore will not resist the political decision.
Terror groups in the Gaza Strip are holding 48 hostages, including 47 of the 251 abducted by Hamas-led terrorists on October 7, 2023. They include the bodies of at least 26 confirmed dead by the IDF. Twenty are believed to be alive and there are grave concerns for the well-being of two others, Israeli officials have said. Hamas is also holding the body of an IDF soldier killed in Gaza in 2014.
Hamas released 30 hostages — 20 Israeli civilians, five soldiers, and five Thai nationals — and the bodies of eight slain Israeli captives during a ceasefire between January and March, and one additional hostage, a dual American-Israeli citizen, in May as a “gesture” to the United States. The terror group freed 105 civilians during a weeklong truce in late November 2023, and four hostages were released before that in the early weeks of the war. In exchange, Israel has freed some 2,000 jailed Palestinian terrorists, security prisoners, and Gazan terror suspects detained during the war.
Eight hostages have been rescued from captivity by troops alive, and the bodies of 51 have also been recovered, including three mistakenly killed by the Israeli military as they tried to escape their captors, and the body of a soldier who was killed in 2014.