Rally at Hostages Square demands a comprehensive Gaza truce: ‘It’s time for a deal that saves everyone’

Speakers at the hostages’ families’ rally at Hostages Square in Tel Aviv demand a comprehensive Gaza ceasefire deal that will return all the captives, amid reports that the emerging deal will include just a 60-day truce and the release of roughly half the hostages.

“It’s time for a deal that saves everyone, living and fallen — a deal without selektziya,” says Maccabit Meyer, aunt of twin-brother hostages Gali and Ziv Berman, referring to the Nazi practice of selecting Jews deemed fit for hard labor and those sent straight to the slaugher during the Holocaust. “We need a time-limited deal that secures the release of everyone, down to the last hostage.”

Yuval Sharabi, daughter of slain hostage Yossi Sharabi, tells the 2,000-odd crowd that Israel’s accomplishments in the 12-day war with Iran last month “were incredible, but if we don’t leverage that to a single comprehensive deal, it’ll be an unbearable diplomatic failure.”

“This country, Dad, is not what you remembered,” she says, addressing her father. “We’re working every day to bring back the values that used to be self-evident. To remind that the living hostages have to return before we lose them like we lost you.”