Residents of the South continued their protest Wednesday against the ceasefire reached the day before between Israel and Hamas – certain that this will be yet another fragile truce that will soon be broken..
Simha Goldin, the father of late IDF soldier Hadar Goldin, whose body has been held by Hamas since Operation Protective Edge in 2014, joined one of the protests, held at Kerem Shalom near the Gaza border.
“Prime Minister [Benjamin Netanyahu] has turned us into a country of suckers, and in the Middle East it is very dangerous to be a sucker,” Goldin told Army Radio.
He added, “There are a lot of people here who stop the trucks, mainly trucks belonging to merchants. There are residents from all over the country.”
“The prime minister is knowingly endangering IDF soldiers and civilians,” Goldin said, “because Hamas has not paid anything for its behavior in abducting [the remains of] a soldier.”
“If they had signed a ceasefire agreement and demanded and received the soldiers, which the Prime Minister promised, the picture would have looked different. We would not look like suckers. The situation is getting worse from week to week,” he added.
Dozens of people, including former Likud MK Moshe Feiglin, participated in that protest, burning tires and blocking supply trucks trying to enter the Gaza Strip.
Students from Gaza border communities, accompanied by their parents, also joined the Kerem Shalom protest demanding “Let us grow up in peace.”
Another protest was held at the Eshkol Junction, where hundreds of striking school children blocked the highway.
While high school students in Sha’ar HaNegev did go to school, they boycotted their classes to protest under the banner “We are not second-class citizens.”
“We started this protest because we were tired of being needy, tired of Hamas controlling the situation and deciding whether or not we go to school,” student Roni Ziv told the Mako news site. “The government doesn’t place any importance on us. The children suffer from trauma and we go back [to school] like everything is normal? We are fed up of this situation.”
Protests were expected to continue through the evening. A major protest is slated to be held Thursday at 7 p.m. in front of Tel Aviv’s Azrieli Center and the Ministry of Defense.
On Tuesday, residents of Gaza border communities burned tires and blocked roads in Sderot and Nir Am following the announcement of the ceasefire. Their protest came after a fierce barrage of nearly 500 rockets on Monday and Tuesday fired by Hamas and other terrorist groups toward Israel. The fusillade was the largest number of rockets ever fired at Israel from the enclave within a 25-hour period.
The protesters said the ceasefire is simply more of the same in a cycle of violence, which has them holed up in safe rooms on a regular basis. Under the banner “We’re tired of shutting up,” they intend to continue to protest in a way that will attract public attention.
Jerusalem Post Staff contributed to this report.