Protesters arrested for blocking roads to Knesset as government passes 2025 budget
Otzma Yehudit MK claims he faced ‘severe violence’; Speaker Ohana demands anti-government activists be ‘brought to justice’; lawyers accuse police of using excessive force
Police clashed with anti-government protesters Tuesday, and a number were arrested as they blocked roads leading to the Knesset building in Jerusalem ahead of the 2025 state budget vote.
The demonstrators were protesting the budget, which critics have accused of being disconnected from the reality of the country’s needs, while also calling for the government to reach a deal to bring back the 59 hostages still in Gaza. Others still were demanding that the police intensify their investigation into the disappearance of a missing Ethiopian-Israeli child.
Despite the protests, the budget passed its third and final reading necessary to become law, in a plenum vote of 66-52.
As Knesset members arrived ahead of the vote on Tuesday morning, a number of protesters attempted to block traffic by parking their cars in the middle of the road, while others blocked the sidewalk and were dragged off by police.
According to a law enforcement spokesman, cops who attempted to tow the vehicles blocking the road were met with resistance from the protesters.
Six people were arrested for “disturbing public order” and taken for questioning, the spokesman said.
A lawyers’ network representing detained anti-government protesters accused the police of using excessive force in the arrests, and said that they had unnecessarily torn the demonstrators’ clothing.
Footage posted on social media showed two protesters being removed from the bed of a tow truck, amid police efforts to clear the roads.
Police officers could be seen in the video forcibly pulling one of the protesters, identified in a post on X as Yaacov Godo, off the bed of the truck by his wrist. Godo’s son Tom Godo was killed by Hamas terrorists in Kibbutz Kissufim in the early hours of October 8, 2023.
The second protester was handcuffed and carried off the truck by three cops — two holding him by each arm and the third holding his legs.
שוטר מרחיק בכוח את יעקב גודו, ששכל את בנו ב-7.10 ושוטרים אוזקים ועוצרים את תא"ל דוד אגמון (78), ששובת רעב חלקית כבר חודשים ואיבד 15 ק"ג, לאחר שניסו לחסום גרר שמפנה רכבי מפגינים ליד הכנסת. pic.twitter.com/17NjxNZc0E
— نير حسون Nir Hasson ניר חסון (@nirhasson) March 25, 2025
Also demonstrating outside the Knesset on Tuesday were a group of around 100 protesters calling for a more thorough investigation into the disappearance of 9-year-old Ethiopian Israeli girl Haymanut Kasau.
Kasau went missing over a year ago from an absorption center for new immigrants in the northern city of Safed.
“Where is Haymanut? Haymanut was kidnapped!” protesters chanted as they marched to the Knesset, converging with the crowd of anti-government protesters.
“Where is the government? Where are the police?”
The protesters wore yellow t-shirts in what organizer Avi Yitzhak described as a mark of solidarity with the hostages held by Hamas in Gaza.
The group accused the police and Shin Bet of ignoring Kasau’s case due to her Ethiopian origin.
“Haymanut wasn’t the right [skin] color,” Yitzhak shouts through a megaphone, demanding the police recategorize her case as a kidnapping.
“If she had just disappeared, they would have found her within a week or two,” he said.
The protesters railing against the 2025 budget appeared to have mixed responses to the crowd, and anti-government protesters attempted to steer the chants.
“One bloc — together we will win!” shouted activist Moshe Radman through his own megaphone, but the chant quickly died out.
Ethiopian-Israeli Knesset members Pnina Tamano-Shata (National Unity) and Moshe Solomon (Religious Zionism) were also in attendance.
As the protesters blocked the road ahead of the budget vote, several lawmakers, including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Otzma Yehudit MK Almog Cohen, were forced to leave their cars and walk the remaining distance to the Knesset building.
In a post on X, Cohen alleged that he had been “attacked with severe violence at the entrance to the Knesset by a group of rioters, backed by the inciting media. The goal of the protest and its leaders is blood in the streets.”
Berating the Israel Police for what he said was a failure to “protect my life,” Cohen warned that had the Knesset Guard not been present at the scene, he would have been forced to “respond” to the protesters.
“Don’t interpret my kindness this morning as weakness,” he said. “You are violent people and dangerous to democracy and the country.”
He shared a seven-second-long video snippet in which Knesset Guard members could be seen surrounding him as he walked through the parking lot, though there was no violence on display.
הותקפתי כעת באלימות קשה בכניסה לכנסת בידי חבורת פורעים, בגיבוי תקשורת מסיתה, משנאלצתי להיכנס ברגל למשכן הכנסת.
מטרת המחאה ומנהיגיה היא דם ברחובות. אל תפרשו את טוב הלב שלי הבוקר כחולשה.צר לי כי משטרת ישראל לא הייתה שם בכדי להגן על חיי, ולולא משמר הכנסת – הייתי נאלץ להגיב, ולא רק… pic.twitter.com/KkY3zVK4Ps
— אלמוג כהן Almog cohen (@almog_cohen08) March 25, 2025
Smotrich, too, had choice words for the protesters, and told them, according to the Kan public broadcaster, that they were “not interested in democracy, but in maintaining privilege and power.”
“When I blocked roads, I was held for three weeks in a Shin Bet prison cell,” he added. “They didn’t let me sit in the road and block traffic like some privileged person.”
Smotrich, who leads the far-right Religious Zionism party, was arrested in 2005 for suspected terrorism, after he and four other activists were found to be in possession of 700 liters of gasoline and oil.
Following the arrest of the six protesters, Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana, of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, denounced their actions and called for law enforcement to take additional steps against them.
“This morning there were violent attempts to block the democratic process in the Knesset and not allow Knesset members to enter the Knesset to vote,” he told the plenum.
He said that law enforcement authorities must “bring the perpetrators to justice and not be satisfied with arrests and towing vehicles, but rather with prosecution.”
“There is freedom of expression in the State of Israel, but no one is free to block the democratic process in the Knesset by force,” he warned. “This is outside the rules of the game.”
Ohana’s call to prosecute the protesters was met with anger from the Democrats chair, Yair Golan, who suggested that he “look in the mirror” when searching for the people harming democracy.
“It is not the protesters in favor of the rule of law who are harming democracy, but this government that is looting the state treasury and transferring budget funds only to evaders, the corrupt, and loyalists,” he charged.
“Democracy is not seizing power by force. Democracy is not turning the budget into a tool in the hands of a jealous and disconnected group,” he continued. “Democracy is responsibility, equality and respect for human life.
Tuesday’s rally was not the first time that police have been accused in recent days of using excessive force against anti-government protesters, as it has started deploying officers from its newly formed National Guard.
Members of its force, a controversy-laden brainchild of National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, have been filmed punching, kicking and hurling protesters to the ground at protests in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
