Man tries to storm stage at anti-government protest as speakers rail against Qatargate scandal

A man is pulled away by police officers during an anti-government protest in Tel Aviv’s Habima Square after he tries twice to leap up onto the stage to disrupt the event.

He is pulled away by police, flailing and cursing, and is sat down at an adjacent bus stop.

A group of protesters follows after him, accusing the police of treating him too leniently.

“This is what it looks like when they try to silence us,” says the main stage speaker Merav Svirsky, whose parents Orit and Rafi were murdered in the Hamas-led onslaught of October 7, 2023, and whose brother Itay was killed in Hamas captivity.

The square is a sea of umbrellas as hundreds of people brave the rain to attend the weekly protest against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government.

The crowd blows whistles and horns as a short video about Netanyahu’s various alleged misdeeds plays on a large screen mounted on the stage. The featured issues include his refusal to establish a state commission of inquiry into the October 7 attack, and his aides’ alleged propagandizing for Hamas-backer Qatar during the war in Gaza, amid a recent series of damning reports about the so-called Qatargate scandal.

Svirsky accuses Netanyahu’s aides of treason.

“The price of the treason is that we have lost so much life,” she says, demanding that Netanyahu resign. “The money that flowed into his office was the same money that paid for the murder of my family.”

“The truth will not be silenced,” she says. “Maybe if we had kicked [the government] out on October 8, Itay would still be here. Maybe if we had kicked them out before that, my parents would still be here.”

Former police chief Roni Alsheich also speaks, alleging Netanyahu’s ties to Qatar go back to 2017, when, per Alsheich, the premier pulled the Gulf state out of diplomatic isolation and let it start sending millions of dollars in cash to Gaza on a monthly basis until the October 7 onslaught. Then, Alsheich alleges, Netanyahu made sure Qatar would become a mediator in the ensuing Gaza war.

“The government gave Qatar a short break to celebrate the massacre with Hamas, then tightened the embrace,” says Alsheich. “On the one hand, it promised to dismantle Hamas’s rule, and on the other hand, put its trust in the people who want Hamas to survive, and whose gambling chips were the tortured hostages.”

“Who made that decision?” Alsheich asks, giving as options the names of Netanyahu aides implicated in Qatargate, Eli Feldstein and Jonatan Urich. “No, my friends — it was the prime minister of Israel.”