”This is huge,” said Alon-Lee Green, co-director of the Jewish-Arab activist group, Standing Together, said at the Tel Aviv rally on April 24 Thursday night, comprised of 10,000 Israeli citizens, Jews and Palestinians alike, who came out to deliver the message: “No, no, no! You cannot kill children!”
The number of rallies in Israel is rising, and the number of protesters participating is becoming larger and larger. The rally in Tel Aviv, however, stands out because it was dedicated to the memory of the butchered children of Gaza.
Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has proclaimed it illegal to hold up photos of any of the 18,000 Palestinian children whom the IDF is known to have killed thus far in Gaza, Green told the rally. He declared that “we are not ashamed or afraid when the Kahane police, Ben-Gvir’s police, tell us that it is illegal to hold photos of those children killed in Gaza…. We do not back down! We did not only defy the police and put pictures of Gazan children on billboards across the country, but now we will raise the thousand of photos of the children given to you here, and we will stand for a minute of silence in memory of the girls and the boys and babies killed by our bombings in Gaza.”
“We are here tonight to say ‘enough’ of the rivers of blood.… To say `yes’ to the Palestinians in Gaza,” he proclaimed.
When Standing Together initially applied for the permit for the rally, the police had instructed them that no photos of dead Gazan children, or even pictures of Israeli hostages, were permitted, nor any signs charging “genocide” or “ethnic cleansing,” all banned as “incendiary.” Standing Together took their case to the press, accusing the police of acting as a political force by “censoring messages in protests against the war and the government…. Since [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu chose to collapse the ceasefire deal to allow Ben-Gvir to return to the coalition, the release of the hostages from Hamas captivity has been halted, and many Palestinian children have died.”
When the Israeli dailies Haaretz and Times of Israel publicized the gag order and questioned the police about it, the police “backtracked,” telling the press that they had issued “updated instructions” which contained no such bans.
