Well over 100,000 Israelis attended protests in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and dozens of other cities across Israel on Saturday night — far more than at recent rallies — as anger over the government’s resumption of fighting in Gaza and the planned removal of the country’s top gatekeepers boiled over.

At Tel Aviv’s Habima Square, tens of thousands filled the plaza and spilled out into the surrounding streets for the weekly anti-government demonstration — a marked increase from previous weekends, when roughly half of the square remained empty.

The surge in attendance was sparked by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bid to fire Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar and Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara and assert greater control over the levers of power.

The protest at Habima Square preceded a second demonstration at nearby Hostages Square, where the public answered a call from the Hostages and Missing Families Forum for a “rage rally” after the fragile two-month ceasefire in the Gaza Strip shattered earlier this week when Israel launched a large-scale aerial offensive followed by a renewed ground campaign.

“The return to fighting could kill the living hostages and cause the fallen to disappear,” the forum warned in its rallying cry to the public. “The only fight should take place in the negotiating room, for the immediate return of all the hostages.”

“Hostages come first,” read the statement. “We can’t give up on them now.”

Habima Square turned into a sea of Israeli flags interspersed with the banners and flags of center-left opposition parties Yesh Atid and the Democrats, whose respective heads, Yair Lapid and Yair Golan, both addressed the teeming crowd.

A large screen mounted on the stage read “Stopping the dictatorship mania,” and protesters chanted: “Netanyahu is an abandoner. Netanyahu isn’t competent!”

The government “is doing everything to start a civil war here,” warned Lapid at the beginning of his address. “Netanyahu is openly pushing for it.”

Referring to statements by senior government ministers over the weekend in which they promised to defy the High Court of Justice should it block the unanimous cabinet decision to fire Bar, Lapid warned that “if the October 7 government decides not to obey the court ruling, it will turn itself that day, that moment, into a criminal government.”

“If that happens, the entire country must stop. The only system that is not allowed to stop is the security system,” Lapid insisted.

“The economy needs to strike, the Knesset needs to strike, the courts need to strike, the local authorities need to strike. Not only the universities need to strike but the schools as well,” he declared.

Over 1,500 faculty members at universities across the country have joined a planned academic strike slated to take place on Sunday in what will likely lead to major class disruptions. The faculty members are receiving support from just about all of the country’s main universities.

“If we can organize a tax revolt, we will organize a tax revolt. We will not be complicit in the destruction of democracy,” Lapid said at the Saturday rally.

His comments echoed sentiments expressed by both the Israel Business Forum and the Histadrut labor union on Friday, which warned that they won’t sit idly by if the government defies the High Court.

Urging the public to continue showing up to the protests, Lapid highlighted all that was at stake.

“If the streets were empty now, Einav [Zangauker] would be a thin woman alone in the great darkness, waiting for [her hostage son] Matan to return,” he said. “If the streets were empty now, Gali Baharav-Miara would have been fired, the courts would have already fallen, Israel would not have been a democracy for a long time.”

“If you hadn’t taken to the streets, we wouldn’t have the power in the Knesset to stop the draft evasion law,” he recalled. “If the streets were empty, if the square........

© The Times of Israel