Israeli students join strikes calling for the government to reach a hostage deal

Israeli students have gone on strike on the first day of the new school year in protest of the Israeli government ‘dragging its feet’ in hostage negotiations.

Led by teenagers across the country and supported by Israeli NGO ‘Yallah Tikvah’, protests were held throughout Israel to demand that a hostage deal be approved without delay. Students came with hostage posters, t-shirts, and banners reading slogans like ‘We refuse to learn to live with this’, referring to the situation that sees 48 Israeli hostages still in captivity after 696 days of war.

In a statement, the group said: “We are not willing to learn to live in a world in which the hostages are murdered in Hamas tunnels and the Israeli government does not even bother to discuss the deal on the table, and therefore we will not allow the school year to begin as usual.”

The protests come after Netanyahu’s reluctance last month to respond to a hostage-ceasefire deal proposed by Qatari and Egyptian mediators, accepted by Hamas, which would have seen the return of half the hostages still in Gaza. Netanyahu’s failure to convene his war cabinet to consider the deal drew outrage from activists and family members of hostages who say that ‘military pressure kills the hostages’ and insist that only negotiation can bring them home alive.