‘We won’t sit in silence’: Thousands of protesters rally in Tel Aviv marking 300 days since October 7

Marking 300 days since October 7, hostage families are rallying in Tel Aviv’s Hostages Square, demanding the government reach a deal to free the captives still held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Before speeches begin, the Hostages and Missing Families Forum displays a brief video on the main stage from January of this year, when a few dozen hostage families gathered near the southern border to shout, sometimes cry, through giant loudspeakers in the direction of the Gaza Strip in hopes that their loved ones would hear them.

Actor Guri Alfi, who is emceeing the rally, speaks first. Behind him, people grip signs with hostages’ names and ages written on them. Many of the hostages’ ages have been updated, nearly 10 months since Hamas’s brutal massacre on Israel’s southern border.

“We are here today to say out loud: ‘We won’t agree to abandonment, we won’t sit in silence, they need to return home, now,'” Alfi says.

“These are critical days and there is a real chance for the signing of a deal to return them all, and we have to fight for it, we have to demand it,” he continues.

After organizers play a recording of the emergency phone call made by Nova partygoer Eden Yerushalmi before Hamas kidnapped her into the Gaza Strip, Shani and May Yerushalmi, sisters of the hostage, speak to the crowd.

“Her [Eden’s] last words to the police were: ‘Find me, OK?’ Eden is still waiting for us to find her,” says Shani. “It has already been 300 days since our sister is in captivity, 300 days that our home is not the same home.”

Earlier this evening, the families of hostages marched around the Kirya military headquarters in Tel Aviv in support of a deal, accompanied by thousands of their supporters.

The families bound themselves in chains while walking along the route, representing the suffering of their loved ones in Gaza, and unfurled a 40-meter-long flag counting the days since the war’s outset.