WEST BANK (Dispatches) – For the second consecutive day, Zionist protesters gathered outside the war ministry in Tel Aviv on Sunday to demand the regime continue a Gaza ceasefire and prisoner exchange agreement with Hamas, Anadolu reports.
According to Maariv newspaper, hundreds of protestors and relatives of Israeli captives in Gaza camped overnight in Tel Aviv to call on prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to sabotage the swap deal.
Protesters demanded that an Israeli negotiating delegation traveling to Doha on Monday be granted full authority to finalize an agreement ensuring the return of all captives at once.
Sunday’s protest came after thousands of demonstrators surrounded the ministry headquarters on Saturday to demand the completion of the ceasefire deal.
Einav Zangauker, the mother of Israeli captive Matan, called for continued public pressure on the government to complete the agreement.
Families of Israeli captives and activists plan to demonstrate daily around the war ministry and stage a sit-in overnight to pile more pressure on the Netanyahu regime to complete the agreement.
The protests come as a recent report has revealed that more than forty Israeli captives held by the Palestinian resistance group Hamas in the Gaza Strip have been killed by the regime’s airstrikes since October 7, 2023.
According to an analysis by The New York Times (NYT) published on Saturday, of the 251 Israeli soldiers and settlers taken captive by Hamas in Gaza, 41 have been killed by “Israeli bombing and friendly fire.”
Citing the Zionist regime’s cabinet, the U.S. daily added that of the 59 Israeli captives still held by Hamas and other Palestinian resistance groups in Gaza, only 24 remain alive and 130 others have been released alive.
“A few [captives] were almost certainly killed in the first days of the war, before it was possible to seal a truce. But many others have died since the brief first cease-fire collapsed in November 2023 and the fighting continued in a war that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians,” the report said.
“The corpses of 40 others have been returned to Israel in exchange for the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners and detainees following ceasefire agreements in November 2023 and January of this year.”
The NYT underlined that its analysis was based on forensic reports and military investigations into the captives’ deaths, as well as interviews with more than a dozen Zionist troops and officials, a senior official and seven relatives of captives.
The paper attributed the deaths to the occupying regime’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s preference to continue his genocidal war on Gaza, rather than reach a deal for a permanent end to the war.
“We could have brought home more [captives] — earlier and for a smaller price,” Yoav Gallant, former Israeli minister of military affairs, said in a televised interview last month.
“Only continued military pressure, until total victory, will bring about the release of all of our [captives],” Netanyahu claimed last year.
Israeli media also reported multiple times since the start of the war that Netanyahu was committed to sabotaging a deal that would end the war and bring the Israeli captives home.