Mass Protests Erupt in Israel as IDF Readies Plans to Occupy Gaza City

The Washington Post

15:49 JST, August 18, 2025

JERUSALEM – Hundreds of thousands of Israelis stayed home from work, flooded city streets, and blocked roads and highways across the country on Sunday, according to local media, staging some of the largest anti-war protests in months as the military prepares for a major assault on Gaza City, the humanitarian crisis there deepens and anxiety mounts over the conditions of the hostages still in captivity.

The widespread strike on Sunday, a work day in Israel, was organized by the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, an umbrella group representing many families of current or former Israeli hostages. The group called for action in response to the government’s decision this month to seize control of Gaza’s largest city, an operation that could take months and involve the forced displacement of an estimated 1 million Palestinians.

Senior military leaders and a growing number of Israeli citizens oppose the plan, worried that it would endanger the 20 hostages authorities presume are still alive, strain army resources and erode prospects for recovering the bodies of 30 more hostages who were either killed in the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, or died in captivity.

“Hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens will shut down the country today with one clear call: Bring back the 50 hostages, end the war,” the forum said.

By nightfall in Tel Aviv, Israel’s cultural and financial hub, massive crowds marched down one of the city’s main boulevards and then gathered in the plaza now known as “Hostages Square.”

“The people demand: Stop the fire!” protesters chanted. “Refuse, refuse. Save the hostages!” they yelled.

The calls came as Eyal Zamir, the chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, met with senior military commanders in Gaza on Sunday. “Today we are approving the plan for the next phase of the war,” which will focus on Gaza City, he said, according to an IDF readout of the meeting.

Later, after a special meeting at the Gaza Division headquarters in southern Israel, Zamir finalized and approved operational plans for capturing Gaza City, according to Israel’s public broadcaster, Kan.

The channel reported that the campaign would roll out in several phases and take roughly four months to complete. Defense Minister Israel Katz is expected to review and green-light the operation in the coming days, after which it will be presented to the cabinet, Israeli media reported.

But as those discussions were underway, major tech companies, some businesses and a body of civil aviation workers said they would allow employees to go on strike Sunday. Israel’s main trade union federation, the Histadrut, declined to participate, though chairman Arnon Bar-David joined protesters in Tel Aviv to show solidarity.

“Declaring a strike would have colored this struggle as a political struggle – and that is the last thing I want to happen,” he told relatives of hostages there. “This is not about right or left, it is about human beings – bringing back those who were kidnapped from their beds, from their shifts or from their tanks.”

The demonstrations kicked off early in cities including Tel Aviv and Haifa, as well as outside Kibbutz Beeri, a community along the perimeter with Gaza that was overrun by Palestinian militants on Oct. 7, 2023. That day, Hamas and allied groups streamed into southern Israel, killed around 1,200 people and took about 250 hostages back to the Gaza Strip. Israel’s retaliatory war in Gaza, which has lasted 22 months, has killed more than 61,000 people, according to local health officials; leveled large swaths of the enclave and plunged the area into a humanitarian crisis.

Israelis, especially in Tel Aviv, have protested regularly throughout the war to call on the government to reach a deal with Hamas to bring the hostages home.

“Enough is enough,” said Aya Shilon-Hadass, a doctor at Sheba Tel HaShomer Medical Center, who joined hundreds of health workers at a march in Tel Aviv. “You can’t build a society or trust one another when our brothers and sisters are abandoned, while the bloodshed continues on both sides. The war must stop.”

Chief opponents of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – including Yair Lapid, a member of the centrist Yesh Atid party, and former defense minister Yoav Gallant – were out with the crowds in Tel Aviv on Sunday, meeting with the hostage families.

Former hostages were also at the protests, including Arbel Yehud, 30, who was held for more than a year by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a smaller militant group in Gaza, before she was released in January during a two-month ceasefire.

“My partner Ariel Cunio and his brother David, along with 48 other hostages, are still there in captivity in Gaza,” she told the crowd, according to the families forum. “I know firsthand what it’s like to be in captivity. I know that military pressure doesn’t bring hostages back – it only kills them.”

Yehud appeared with five other freed hostages, as well as the widow of one who was killed in captivity, in a video screened at the protest late Sunday. In English, they appealed to President Donald Trump, a key ally of the prime minister.

Iair Horn, 47, was released earlier this year. But his younger brother, 38-year-old Eitan, remains in captivity. “You have the power to make history, to be the president of peace who ends the war, ends the suffering and brings every hostage home, including my little brother,” Horn said.

Several local governments threw their support behind Sunday’s protests: Tel Aviv canceled some cultural activities and shut swimming pools, and the municipality in nearby Herzliya said it would bus residents to the main protest Sunday night.

Protesters blocked highways and key intersections throughout the country, bringing traffic in parts of Tel Aviv to a standstill. “Everyone home now!” protesters shouted, staring down the cars. One frustrated driver, an air-conditioning technician named Eli, who was on his way to work, got out of his car to try to negotiate with the protesters to move out of the way.

“War is terrible for everyone but we need to secure our lives here,” he said in an interview, speaking on the condition that his last name be withheld for fear of retaliation. “It’s either us or them,” he added of the Palestinians in Gaza, calling on Israel to “eliminate them all, from young to old.”

“It helps Hamas, what they are doing,” he said of the protests. “It doesn’t help us. It disrupts our lives.”

Police said they would not allow protesters to block roads without “proper authorization,” and in some places scuffled with and physically removed the demonstrators. By early afternoon, police had arrested 38 people, the spokesperson’s unit said in a statement.

Netanyahu, who spoke Sunday ahead of a cabinet meeting, said the protesters were prolonging the war. “Those who today are calling to end the war without the defeat of Hamas are not only hardening Hamas’s stance and pushing further away the release of our hostages, they are also ensuring that the atrocities of Oct. 7 will be repeated and that we will have to fight an endless war,” he said.

Meanwhile, Israeli forces have stepped up their bombardment of Gaza City, residents and medics said, focusing their strikes on the southern neighborhood of Zeitoun, one of the city’s largest. Emergency personnel and local media have in recent days reported intense bombing in the area, forcing much of the population out. Gaza’s civil defense force described the strikes and shelling as “relentless,” and said that ambulances have been unable to reach most of the people they say are trapped under the rubble.

In nearby al-Shifa Hospital, director Mohamed Abu Salmiya said dozens of injured and dead had arrived over the preceding 24 hours – including casualties from the shelling in Zeitoun and those who had been shot while trying to retrieve aid from humanitarian convoys at the Zikim border crossing in the north.

“The artillery, airstrikes and fire are almost constant. It’s horrific, they never stop,” said Mohamed Orabi, 42, a dentist displaced from Zeitoun to the Rimal area in the western part of Gaza City. “Sometimes it stops for 10 minutes or so, then it starts again,” he said.

Israel said Saturday that it was preparing to move people from combat zones to southern Gaza and that it would begin allowing humanitarian organizations to bring tents into the enclave to facilitate the move. Kan, the Israeli broadcaster, reported Sunday that the forced evacuation of civilians could begin in as little as two weeks.

U.N. human rights chief Volker Türk said earlier this month that the planned operation would violate international law. It “will result in more massive forced displacement, more killing, more unbearable suffering, senseless destruction and atrocity crimes,” he said in a statement.