By the time the eagerly awaited but successively postponed press conference in Doha began, just before 9 p.m. Israel time on Wednesday evening, the mood at the hostage protest camp on Jerusalem’s Balfour Street was quiet.
Many in the Middle East and beyond were glued to their TV screens, watching Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani announce a historic ceasefire agreement, starting Sunday, that will see 33 hostages exchanged for many more Palestinian prisoners; Israeli forces withdraw from populated areas; and humanitarian aid enter the decimated coastal strip; just five people were gathered in the protest tent in the Israeli capital – a meeting point of the Hostages and Missing Families Forum over the 15 months during the war.
“It’s a bittersweet feeling,” Yael, 17, and a regular at the camp, said of the deal. “I don’t think you’re going to see many celebrating it since most likely not everyone will come back,” she told The Jerusalem Post.
Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups are still holding a total of 98 hostages and of the 33 to be released most, but not all are believed to still be alive. “Everyone’s holding their breath,” Yael explained. “That’s why there aren’t many people on the streets tonight.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it, when I turn on the television and see them on their way back,” Zina, a 70-year-old with red-framed glasses and graying hair, added. She described her emotions as “a mix of hope and anxiety,” having been let down by previous announcements that a deal was close. Many relatives of the hostages remain similarly cautious and are currently not giving media interviews.
However, at Jerusalem’s Chords Bridge, the mood was defiant. Critics of the deal – a mix of ultra-Orthodox and national-religious young men and teenagers, as well as many minors – repeatedly blocked the busy intersection in protest, while the police half-heartedly tried to clear it. “Release of the hostages: Only through victory and by defeating the enemy,” read one placard in Hebrew. Another: “The release of terrorists will spill blood.”
“The first deal was good,” David, a 19-year-old haredi originally from New York, told the Post – speaking of the ceasefire agreement in November 2023 that saw 105 hostages return home.
“But this deal is no better than the one with [Gilad] Schalit,” he said, referring to the release of 1,000 prisoners to free the captured Israeli soldier in 2011, among whom was Yahya Sinwar who became a Hamas leader and the architect of October 7. “This deal is too good for Hamas,” he criticized, not elaborating on the concrete differences between the current and previous November deal.
“Of course, we want the hostages home,” Raziel, a 20-year-old Jerusalemite wearing a kippah, tzitzit, and a black windbreaker, told the Post. “But it’s not worth it, because the terrorists will come back and create more terror and if we withdraw from Gaza, it will happen all over again.”
Raziel criticized the Schalit deal, Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005, and the Oslo Accords – a pair of interim peace agreements signed between Israel and the Palestinians in the 1990s. Of the humanitarian aid now set to enter Gaza as part of the deal, he said: “Don’t give them food, because that will make them strong, and we don’t want that.”
By Thursday morning, banners critical of the deal had appeared at several busy intersections across Jerusalem, reading “It’s not victory.” Just hours later, though, some had already been torn down, highlighting the divided opinions on the ceasefire agreement in the Israeli capital.
Wider opinions
According to a poll by the Israeli Democracy Institute published on Wednesday, a majority (57.5%) of Israelis support a comprehensive deal for the release of all the hostages in return for an end to the war in Gaza.
Also on Thursday morning, some bereaved families of fallen soldiers and security personnel calling themselves the Heroism Forum staged a protest near the Supreme Court on Jerusalem’s Sderot Yitzhak Rabin – with mock coffins draped in Israeli flags, to “represent the price in blood that the State of Israel will pay after signing this deal,” the organization wrote in a press release.
Yoshua Shani, chairman of the Heroism Forum and father of Ori Mordechai, a soldier killed by a Hamas rocket on October 7, told reporters at the demonstration: “This deal will not let us destroy Hamas and bring the nation to a total victory.” He warned the security cabinet, which was due to vote on it later that day, about the dangers of passing the deal: “Think about the price the nation is going to pay... We believe this deal will bring us back to October 6.” He called the release of about a thousand terrorists a “catastrophe.”
Just around the corner, in front of the Knesset, a few people active with the Hostage and Missing Families Forum had gathered at their usual protest camp. One of them was Roni Meretz, 56, who has been on a hunger strike for 115 days, only drinking water with minerals and supplements, she said, until all hostages have been released. “I’m very angry about the deal because I think we should have done one a long time ago,” she told the Post. She criticized that not all of the 98 hostages would return home as she clutched a Hebrew copy of Sophie’s Choice, a book about choosing which children should live and die during the Holocaust, which Meretz said reminded her of the current situation.
“It’s not a good deal,” Meretz said. She voiced anger at figures such as Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Ministry Itamar Ben-Gvir for constantly torpedoing hostage talks. “They are murdering the hostages whom they don’t care about,” she said. “All they want to do is build new Jewish settlements in Gaza. They are the enemies of the country.”
Speaking about the demonstration of the Heroism Forum just up the road, Meretz said: “I cannot argue with the family of a kidnapped person who are against the deal.” But many of them do not even have relatives in Gaza, she criticized. “The most important thing is to bring those people back to Israel. We – the army, the government, the country – failed to protect them. It is our responsibility to bring them home.”
On Sunday, the first hostages are scheduled to be released – three women. Four more will be released on day seven of the ceasefire, and 26 more – women, children, men over age 50, and sick or wounded people – over the following five weeks. In exchange, Israel must free several Palestinian prisoners for each hostage, some of whom are serving life sentences.