the march of relatives of hostages held in Gaza arrives in Jerusalem

The families of the hostages criticize the Israeli government for not providing them with information on the efforts made to obtain the release of the hostages.

The procession of relatives of hostages held in Gaza arrived in Jerusalem on Saturday, November 18, after several days of walking. Their goal is to maintain pressure on the Israeli government to obtain their release, six weeks after the deadly Hamas terrorist attack. “Take them home now.”proclaimed, as for several weeks, a few thousand demonstrators, called to gather in front of the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

At the start of the afternoon, a compact crowd, Israeli flags and portraits of hostages in their hands, arrived in Jerusalem after leaving Tel Aviv, about sixty kilometers away, on Tuesday, journalists from the AFP.

The families of the hostages, who criticize the government for not providing them with information on their efforts to obtain the release of the hostages, obtained a meeting after this demonstration with two members of the war cabinet, Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot. The meeting is to be held in the early evening in Tel Aviv, at the headquarters of the Forum of Families of Hostages and Missing, the organization set up to provide logistical assistance to the relatives of some 240 hostages identified by the Israeli authorities.

Call for ceasefire rejected by Israel

The Israeli government has so far rejected any call for a ceasefire in the conflict between Hamas, classified as terrorist by Israel, the United States and the European Union. A new demonstration is to be held on Saturday evening, like every week, in Tel Aviv square which has become the rallying point for the hostages’ cause.

The attack by the Palestinian Islamist movement left 1,200 dead on the Israeli side, the majority of them civilians killed on October 7, according to the Israeli authorities. According to the latest report from the Hamas government, 12,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli bombings on the Gaza Strip since the start of the war, including 5,000 children and 3,300 women. No on-site source or image can support this assessment.


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