At Tel Aviv protest, killed hostage’s mother says government ‘chose to give up on our sons’

Maayan Sherman, mother of the killed hostage Ron Sherman, calls for an immediate ceasefire and hostage deal in a speech to a rally on Tel Aviv’s Begin Road for the release of the captives held by Hamas.

“Netanyahu and his defense minister knowingly chose to kill my son,” who, she says, was serving as a human shield for a senior Hamas official.

“I’m here as a bereaved mother and aunt, to save other mothers from the same fate,” she says.

The government “chose to give up on our sons,” she says, castigating the government’s plans to continue the war with an invasion of Gaza City.

“The guerrilla war in Gaza will cost much blood of our soldiers,” she says, condemning the government as one “that sends the sons of others to death and is working just for personal and political motives.”

“The goals of destruction of Hamas and saving the hostages are contradictory,” she says. “Whoever chooses one gives up on the other.”

She calls for an “immediate ceasefire and deal now.”

Otherwise, she says, the country is “going to lose the future of our beloved state of Israel.”

On December 14, 2023, IDF troops recovered Ron’s body from a tunnel in northern Gaza along with those of Nik and Elia Toledano.

An IDF investigation published in September 2024 revealed that Ron, Elia and Nik were killed on November 10, 2023, as a result of a “byproduct” of an Israeli airstrike in the Gaza Strip, likely indicating that they suffocated or were killed by carbon monoxide poisoning inside a tunnel. Ron’s family said he had asthma and needed an inhaler.

The rally draws thousands and is held a day ahead of a general strike called by hostage families to oppose the Gaza City invasion and call for a hostage deal.