The outrage against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the discovery of six more hostage bodies in a tunnel in Gaza will materialise on Monday in a general strike, the first in almost eleven months of war. It will initially last one day and begin at 06:00 (one hour less in mainland Spain). Two hours later it will spread to the country’s main airport, Ben-Gurion, near Tel Aviv. It will affect both landings and takeoffs. This was announced by Arnon Bar David, the president of the large trade union centre, the Histadrut, after meeting with relatives of the hostages in Gaza, who had been calling for a strike since this morning.
This is the main consequence so far of the recovery of the six lifeless bodies, which has sparked within a few hours an outrage against the head of government that the country has not seen for months, for his de facto blocking of a ceasefire agreement in Gaza that would allow the return of the hostages. There is also a demonstration planned for this afternoon in Tel Aviv that is expected to be massive.
The Histadrut, not keen on calling general strikes, has been under pressure for two years to call strikes against the government: first, against the controversial judicial reform; this year, to force the prime minister to agree to a hostage swap with Hamas. Only once has it agreed: in March 2023, before the war and at one of the high points of mass protests against the divisive reform.
By late Saturday, social media was buzzing with reports of the recovery of the bodies, which had not yet been confirmed by the army, adding fuel to the fire: a week earlier, six other hostages had also been recovered in the Strip. All twelve had been captured alive by Hamas during its attack on October 7, 2023. And their return in coffins, 11 months later, is, for the Forum for Hostages and Missing Persons — the main organization pushing for an agreement with Hamas — a “direct consequence” of Netanyahu not having signed that pact for their release.
“A deal to return the hostages has been on the table for more than two months. If it weren’t for the madness, the excuses and the back-and-forth, the hostages whose deaths we learned of this morning would probably still be alive,” said Forum on X, the social network formerly known as Twitter. According to polls, Netanyahu has regained much of his popularity, but most Israelis still believe he is prolonging the bloody invasion of Gaza for his own political survival, not military considerations.
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Their names are Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Eden Yerushalmi, Ori Danino, Alex Lubnov, Carmel Gat and Almog Sarusi. It’s not just that it’s raining on wet ground. It’s also that, unlike those recovered dead last week, whose ages (four of them were between 75 and 80 years old) made their survival more difficult amid bombings in a Gaza where food, water and medicine are lacking, most of them on this occasion were in their twenties, so the symbolic impact of their smiling photographs still alive has been greater. The militiamen captured them at Nova, the open-air festival next to the border with Gaza where people were still dancing at dawn on October 7, 2023 and which ended up turning into a massacre and desperate flight.
The eldest, Gat, was 40 years old; the youngest, Goldberg-Polin, was 23. The latter was among the best known, because his family was involved in the cause of his return (in a video released by Hamas in April he appeared with a stump, but alive) and he also had American citizenship. In fact, it was President Joe Biden who made the announcement, “devastated and outraged.” Kamala Harris, the vice president and Democratic candidate for the presidential elections in November, who ―like Biden― had met with the hostage’s family, has “strongly condemned the continued brutality” of the “evil terrorist organization” Hamas.
The Israeli army claims that the hostages were killed a few days ago. The Forum therefore links their deaths to the “delay in signing an agreement” and has called for a protest in Tel Aviv late on Sunday, which it expects to be massive. It has also called on Netanyahu to appear publicly to take responsibility for “abandoning the hostages”. He responded with a recorded message (not a press conference) in which he blames Hamas for the failure of the negotiations in Doha and Cairo, which are currently at a standstill: “Those who kill hostages do not want an agreement”. A Hamas political leader, Izzat al Rishq, has stated in a statement that the hostages died in Israeli “bombings”, not murder.
The opposition leader also calls for a strike
The anger caused by the news has gone beyond the street or those personally involved. Former Prime Minister and opposition leader Yair Lapid has also called on all those whose “hearts were broken this morning” to paralyze the country. And Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, from the same party as Netanyahu (Likud), has issued a statement asking the security cabinet to reverse “immediately” the decision it made two days ago and make it even more difficult to reach a ceasefire agreement: making it an insurmountable red line in the negotiations for the Israeli army to maintain troops on the border between Gaza and Egypt, called the Philadelphia Corridor, once the war is over.
Gallant was the only one of ten ministers in the security cabinet who voted against, and this Sunday he publicly stressed that, although it was “too late for the hostages who were murdered in cold blood”, it was not too late to recover the other hundred, of whom it is estimated that at least a third are already dead. Hamas demands a complete military withdrawal from the Strip and the Israeli army itself sees no problem with a multinational force monitoring the entry of weapons under the Philadelphia Corridor, where it claims to have disabled 80% of the tunnels that connect to the Sinai, in Egypt. It is, in fact, a demand introduced by Netanyahu to the outlines of an already agreed draft.
The news also coincided with one of the deadliest attacks against Israelis in recent weeks. Several Palestinians opened fire from a passing car on a police vehicle near the Tarqumiya checkpoint in the south of the West Bank, a territory that Israel has occupied militarily for half a century. They killed three policemen.
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