Hundreds attend first in-person rally for hostages since Iran ceasefire

By Noam Lehmann 26 June 2025, 9:19 pm

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Hundreds of anti-government protesters gather at Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square to demand a ceasefire-hostage deal in Gaza.

The demonstration, the first of its type since the Iran ceasefire on Tuesday following a 12-day war, highlights the plight of mothers of soldiers stationed in the Strip. It comes a day after the IDF announced seven Combat Engineer Corps soldiers were killed in Khan Younis.

One of the organizing groups of the protest is Ima Era (Wide-awake mother), which brings together mothers with soldiers.

The group’s name alludes to mothers’ difficulty sleeping knowing their children could be killed at war — a fear that speakers say is foreign to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and many of his ministers.

All the speakers are women, most of them mothers of soldiers.

Opening the protest, a choir of soldiers’ mothers sings “Hatikva,” Israel’s national anthem.

Labor MK Efrat Rayten, herself the mother of a combat soldier who has served in Gaza, calls for Israel to “end the war now and strive toward a diplomatic settlement.”

She harks back to the history of Rabin Square, the site of some of Israel’s largest anti-war demonstrations, when mothers of soldiers demanded an end to Israel’s 1982-2000 military presence in southern Lebanon.

“This square has seen mothers get their sons out of the morass of Lebanon. Now it’s our turn to get them out of the morass of Gaza,” she says.

“It’s not our children who should pay the price of the failed leadership,” she says. “It’s the government. And they’ll pay the price.”

Ima Era activist Michal Hadas Rubin, whose son is a combat soldier in Gaza, says the government is “buying day after day of political survival, and paying with the lives of our children.”

She says she taught her children to enlist in the IDF out of a feeling of national responsibility, but that’s “not a blank check to sacrifice our children.”

“The military mission ended long ago, but it can be completed only through diplomatic action,” she says. “Wars end with agreements.”

After the speeches, protesters march to the Begin Road entrance to the IDF headquarters to continue the demonstration there. Many of the protesters hold small battery-powered toy candles. Backing up the march is a mock funeral procession with eight faux coffins.