Weekly anti-government and left-wing demonstrations were held Saturday evening in multiple locations across the country to decry the government’s policies on Haredi military exemptions, settler violence, the lack of a probe of Hamas’s onslaught of October 7, 2023, and more, with hundreds attending the main rally at Tel Aviv’s Habima Square.

Shir Matias, whose parents Deborah (Shachar) and Shlomi were killed protecting her brother Rotem at their Kibbutz Holit home in the Hamas-led 2023 mass invasion, accused the government of having “violated the most basic contract between state and citizen” by failing to probe the security debacle and seeking to codify the Haredi exemption from military service.

“A huge part of the public carries a full burden, and another part is exempt from it,” she told the roughly 300 people who showed up for the rally. “Rights and duties are handed out for political reasons and not for the collective good.”

The government “defiles our dead, ignores our suffering and dodges establishing a state commission of inquiry” into the Hamas attack, she said.

“Everyone whose hands were on the steering wheel on October 7 needs to go home,” she said. “Accountability can’t be a dirty word in a state that wants to keep........

© The Times of Israel