Middle East Crisis: As Israel’s Rifts Widen, Netanyahu Remains Defiant

“Politically, it could have been much worse for Netanyahu,” said Ariel Kahana, a commentator for Israel Hayom, a leading right-wing newspaper. “It looks like the opposition has lost,” Mr. Kahana added.

While the strike slowed or suspended services at thousands of schools and several municipalities, transport networks and hospitals, some sectors were only partly affected. Many municipal authorities and institutions declined to take part.

Unlike in March 2023, when a general strike and mass protests prompted Mr. Netanyahu to suspend a contentious plan to overhaul the judiciary, this time his right-wing party maintained the public unity it has displayed throughout the war. Only Yoav Gallant, the defense minister, voted against a recent cabinet motion to restrict the circumstances in which Israel could agree to a cease-fire, and few, if any, other senior officials from his party, Likud, have broken ranks in public.

“The first condition for victory in this existential war is internal unity,” Mr. Netanyahu said in his speech on Monday night, even as more protesters tried to break through police lines near his private residence in Jerusalem. “We need to stand together as one against a cruel enemy that wants to destroy us all, each and every one,” he said.

The defiance from Mr. Netanyahu and dissent from his critics reflected the growing schism within Israel about the country’s immediate priorities.

The protesters want the government to compromise and agree to a cease-fire and hostage release deal even if it allows Hamas to survive the war. The government and its supporters want to hold out for a deal that will make it easier for the Israeli military to continue fighting Hamas after a short truce — even if playing hardball delays the release of the hostages and more to die in captivity.

The protesters were particularly incensed by the announcement on Sunday that the Israeli military had discovered the bodies of six Israeli hostages who were previously thought to be alive, and who the military said had recently been killed by Hamas. The government’s critics said that most if not all of them could have been saved if Mr. Netanyahu had agreed to a truce.

Funerals for some of the slain hostages took place on Monday afternoon in the presence of vast crowds of mourners.

“I really hope that this is a turning point,” said Gil Dickmann, a cousin of one of the hostages buried on Monday, Carmel Gat. Speaking at a news briefing hours before the funeral, Mr. Dickmann agreed that it was important for Israel to destroy Hamas, but said that the hostages must be freed first.

“Act now and sign this deal,” Mr. Dickmann said. “We must save lives before it’s too late.”

By nightfall, Mr. Dickmann’s demand had gone unmet, as the prime minister doubled down on his refusal to withdraw from strategic areas of Gaza, a core Hamas demand.

In part, Mr. Netanyahu remained unswayed because the protesters were not drawn from his right-wing base, meaning that he faces little political cost for ignoring them, analysts said.

Mr. Netanyahu's right-wing supporters largely accept his argument for driving a hard bargain with Hamas. In fact, the strike and protests are likely to boost Mr. Netanyahu in the eyes of right-wing Israelis, because they feel he is being criticized in bad faith, according to Nadav Shtrauchler, a political analyst and former strategist for Mr. Netanyahu.

“His supporters see this strike as a prize for terror,” Mr. Shtrauchler said. “For many people on the right wing, it’s not reasonable,” Mr. Shtrauchler added.

After Mr. Netanyahu rejected the protesters’ demands on Monday night, a firebrand Likud lawmaker, Tally Gotliv, exemplified the buoyant mood of his base. “This is how you do it!” Ms. Gottliv wrote on social media. “Mr. Prime Minister, a demonstration of control and leadership.”

In 2023, it was increasingly vocal unease from a handful members of Likud’s moderate wing that helped persuade Mr. Netanyahu to slow the pace of his judicial overhaul.

Now, there is less internal opposition. Mr. Gallant, the defense minister, was the sole cabinet member who voted against a motion last week that prevents Israel from agreeing to withdraw from Gaza as part of a cease-fire deal, a decision that makes a deal less likely. And Mr. Gallant was again a lone voice on Sunday, as he called on the cabinet to reverse its decision.

“No one in Likud is saying: We’re going to bring you down,” said Mr. Shtrauchler. “The only opposition is from Gallant.”

Some political moderates may have been put off by the accusatory tone of the protests and strikes, Mr. Kahana said. Two recent polls suggested that significant numbers of Israelis still feel there are legitimate reasons to be wary of a cease-fire deal that cedes too much ground to Hamas.

“Everyone wants, of course, the hostages back home now. But at the same time we want our security,” said Mr. Kahana, who shares Mr. Netanyahu’s wariness of a hasty truce. “The disagreement is about how to bring them home.”

Others may have avoided joining the strike because they feel that the social unrest throughout the first nine months of 2023 made Israel more vulnerable to Hamas’s attack last October.

Israelis of all backgrounds agree that the 2023 domestic unrest weakened Israel in the eyes of its enemies. The fear of creating a similar impression likely dented support for the protests among some Israelis, Mr. Kahana said.

“One of the main lessons for mainstream Israelis from 2023 was that we must keep our unity,” he said.

Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting from Jerusalem.

Israeli soldiers withdrew from Tulkarm last week after two days of fighting, even as a raid continued in the city of Jenin to the north. But on Monday evening, Israeli forces began again deploying throughout Tulkarm in large numbers, said Ma’mun Abu al-Heija, a resident of Nur Shams, a neighborhood on the city’s outskirts.

Israeli troops typically use less force in operations in the West Bank than they do in Gaza, much of which has been destroyed in Israel’s nearly 11-month-long war against Hamas. But these raids have been unusually destructive, residents and Palestinian officials in the West Bank said.

Israeli bulldozers have torn up main roads — in what military officials say is an effort to unearth improvised explosives planted by militants — along with water pipes and electrical cables. Many Palestinians in Jenin have spent days without electricity or running water, according to the local governor, Kamal Abu al-Rub.

Some residents of Jenin have begun to flee, fearing for their lives. Omar Obeid, 62, said he had left the city over the weekend with his children and many of his neighbors, walking through streets torn up by Israeli forces. They had been trapped at home for days without running water or electricity, he said.

“We tried to take a path that would avoid the army, but we still were risking our lives,” he said in a phone interview.

Eventually, he said, they reached a relative’s home in nearby Yabad and took shelter. Intermittent gunfire and explosions are distant but still audible, he said.

Israeli officials have described the raids as necessary to combat rising Palestinian militancy, particularly a spate of attempted bombings, over the past few weeks. The return of the tactic has revived difficult memories for Israelis, whose national psyche was scarred by dozens of Palestinian suicide attacks in the early 2000s that left hundreds of civilians dead.

Over the weekend, two cars rigged with explosives burst into flames during attacks in the southern West Bank. Israeli forces killed the two assailants, who Hamas said were members of its armed wing. And on Monday, Israel’s police said sappers had disarmed a car bomb near the Israeli settlement of Ateret in the central West Bank.

In mid-August, Hamas and its ally Palestinian Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for a bombing in Tel Aviv that wounded one person and killed the assailant. The armed groups claimed it was a suicide bombing.

More than 60 living hostages, and the bodies of about 35 others taken captive on Oct. 7 but believed to be dead, are still in Gaza, according to the Israeli authorities.

In all, about 250 people were abducted on Oct. 7, according to Israeli officials, who include in that number 37 people who were murdered in the initial attack and whose bodies were taken back to Gaza. Those taken were mainly civilians but also included military and security personnel. They were men, women and children, Israeli citizens as well as people who were citizens of the United States, Britain, France, Russia, Germany, Mexico, Thailand and other countries.

How many hostages are Americans?

In all, 12 people with U.S. citizenship were abducted to Gaza on Oct. 7, according to the Israeli government. Two of them, Judith Raanan and her daughter, Natalie Raanan, were freed on Oct. 20 after pressure on Hamas by the United States and Qatar. Two others were released during a cease-fire in November.

One of the hostages, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23, a dual Israeli American citizen, was among the six who were found dead in Gaza over the weekend. He had been taken from a music festival in southern Israel on Oct. 7.

The American Jewish Committee, an advocacy organization for Jewish people around the world, on Saturday listed four American citizens who were still being held alive in Gaza. They are Edan Alexander, 20; Sagui Dekel-Chen, 35; Omer Neutra, 22; and Keith Siegel, 64. Three others are presumed dead: Itay Chen, 19; Gadi Haggai, 73; and Judi Weinstein Haggai, 70.

How many hostages have been freed?

Since Oct. 7, 117 people have been released, according to the Israeli authorities. More than 100 were freed during a one-week cease-fire at the end of November in exchange for 240 Palestinians held in Israeli detention.

In addition, eight people have been freed during Israeli military operations. Last week, a Bedouin Arab citizen of Israel was rescued after Israeli commandos found him alone in a tunnel in southern Gaza.

In the most high-profile hostage rescue, in June, soldiers and special operations police rescued four hostages from buildings in the town of Nuseirat, in central Gaza. Scores of Palestinians, including women and children, were killed during that operation, according to the health ministry in Gaza.

In December, Israeli forces mistakenly killed three hostages who had escaped from their captors and were attempting to approach them. The army said the shooting violated its rules of engagement.

What are the conditions like for those still in captivity?

Hostages who have returned from captivity in Gaza have shed some light on where they were held and what the conditions were like. Some were held in hospitals, others in apartments, a mosque and even a destroyed supermarket. Hamas has also been known to hold hostages underground in a network of tunnels. The Israeli military said on Sunday that the bodies of the six slain hostages were found in a tunnel.

Many hostages who have left Gaza have described being moved repeatedly during their captivity, under heavily armed guard. They reported being subjected to physical and psychological abuse.

Andrey Kozlov, 27, a Russian Israeli, provided a detailed account of his time in captivity after he was rescued by the Israeli military in June. He described being held in six locations in the first two months and being moved to an apartment in mid-December. In some places, he and the hostages he was held with had only a pail for a toilet, and food was scarce.

After the rescue of Mr. Kozlov and three other captives, Dr. Itai Pessach, the head of a medical team for returning hostages, said they were malnourished. “They were all abused, punished and tortured physically and psychologically in many ways,” he said.

Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting.

In the video, Ms. Yerushalmi expressed her love for her parents and two sisters and said she missed them. Her eyes were rimmed by dark circles. Her speech was animated.

Rights groups and international law experts say that a hostage video is, by definition, made under duress, and that the statements in it are usually coerced. Israeli officials have called the videos a form of “psychological warfare,” and experts say their production can constitute a war crime.

The circumstances of how the video was filmed were unclear, and the footage appears to have been edited. It was released on Hamas’s social media channels at about 10 p.m. in Israel. Earlier on Monday, Hamas released an edited video of all six slain hostages, suggesting that more videos would be published in the coming hours or days.

Following the video’s release on the messaging app Telegram, the Yerushalmi family issued a brief statement through the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, which represents relatives of the captives, calling the video a “shocking psychological terror video that Hamas published.”

Responding to her comments in the video, the family said: “Our Eden, we love you, too, and we miss you like crazy. You are forever in our hearts.”

On the day she was abducted, Ms. Yerushalmi sent her family a video of rocket fire from the Nova music festival, saying she was leaving the event, and also called the police, pleading with them to find her, according to a statement on Sunday from the Hostages and Missing Families Forum.

For four hours during the attack, Ms. Yerushalmi stayed in phone contact with her sisters, the statement said, and the last words they heard were, “They’ve caught me.”

In November, Ms. Yerushalmi’s sisters lit candles for her in New York City at the gravesite of a major spiritual leader in Judaism. They giggled at the time, trying to explain her nickname — “Opossum” — an old inside joke the sisters could no longer recall. Relatives of Ms. Yerushalmi had also traveled to Paris and Washington to press for the release of the hostages.

In a video posted in April, Ms. Yerushalmi’s sisters said she was a waitress in Tel Aviv who loved to make TikTok videos, rode a motorcycle and was “always the life of the party.”

“She’s very friendly,” they said in another video, posted in July. “She lives life to the fullest.”