Thousands crowd Hostages Square to mark ‘600 days of abandonment’

Some 3,000 people crowd into Tel Aviv’s Hostages Square and the adjacent Shaul HaMelech Road for a rally marking 600 days since the Hamas onslaught of October 7, 2023.

Actor Lior Ashkenazi, who regularly emcees the Hostage Families Forum’s rallies at the Square, kicks off tonight’s rally with an angry tirade against the government’s failure to reach a ceasefire-hostage deal in Gaza or probe the security failure that sparked the war there.

“Six hundred days since the failure, and another 600 days of failure,” he says, as the crowd jeers and hoists pictures of the remaining captives. “Six hundred days of abandonment, of fleecing the public, of covering up the investigation of the greatest failure in our history,” says Ashkenazi.

The rally is set to feature speeches from captivity survivors Ohad Ben Ami and Yair Horn, both of whom were released in the latest ceasefire, the first phase of which ended on March 2 amid Israel’s refusal to negotiate the second. Horn’s younger brother Eitan is still held captive. Idit Ohel, mother of hostage Alon Ohel, will also speak.

Also set to speak is Miriam Lapid, a founder of the 1970s settler movement Gush Emunim, who became a symbol of national trauma in 1994 when her son and husband were murdered by Hamas near Hebron in the West Bank.

At the time, she was a leading member of slain IDF general Rehavam Zeevi’s Moledet party, which campaigned for Israel to “transfer” Palestinians abroad.

Lapid raised some eyebrows on the right in March, when she railed against the government at a Jerusalem protest against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s motion to oust Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar. She later told religious news site Kipa that the speech, in which she urged religious people to join the demonstrations, had been improvised after someone in the crowd recognized her and asked her to speak.