From the Liveblog of
Saturday, April 5, 2025
MK at anti-government rally in Tel Aviv accuses PM of seeking to turn Israel into Hungary
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Some 1,000 people gather for a demonstration at Habima Square in Tel Aviv before marching to join the anti-government hostage families’ protest outside the Begin Road entrance to the IDF headquarters.
Yesh Atid lawmaker Yoav Segalovitz tells the crowd at Habima that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is lying about Qatar amid the probe into the allegedly illicit ties between the premier’s top aides and the Hamas-backing Gulf emirate.
Quoting a video statement Netanyahu put out this week, Segalovitz says that “all of a sudden, Qatar has become a ‘complex country.’ A country that deals with terrorism, where Hamas people reside permanently, is suddenly a ‘complex country.'”
He says Netanyahu has a “mark of Cain mark on his forehead” for failing to prevent the Hamas onslaught of October 7, 2023, “whitewashing” far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and introducing “conspiratorial terms such as ‘deep state’ into public discourse.”
“I’m proud to have been part of the deep state,” says Segalovitz, a former commander of the police’s Lahav 433 major crimes unit, which is investigating the so-called Qatargate affair.
Segalovitz says that Netanyahu, who is on a state visit to Budapest, wants to make Israel like Hungary, where “the justice system has been suppressed, the constitution changed, the press isn’t free, academia is trampled.”
“Netanyahu gets his picture taken by the Danube,” he says, referring to a photo of the premier at a Holocaust memorial in Budapest this week. “He has yet to come to Nir Oz” Segalovitz adds, referring to the southern Kibbutz that was ravaged in the Hamas-led October 2023 attack.
The demonstration also features a speech from former foreign minister Tzipi Livni.
The crowd cheers as she reads a litany of grievances against Netanyahu. The applause is especially strong when she accuses the government of enabling “violent rampages of killing and destruction by Jews against Arabs in Judea and Samaria,” a rare reference to the West Bank at the Habima demonstration.
The Times of Israel Community.