A crowd of demonstrators gathered Sunday outside the Israeli ambassador’s D.C. residence to memorialize the six dead Israeli hostages recovered from a Gaza tunnel the day before, echoing calls for an end to the war during the larger protests that have spread through Israel.
Carrying reprinted portraits of the six deceased hostages, many of the demonstrators expressed frustration with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s failure to negotiate a peace deal that would lead to the release of the men, women and children kidnapped by Hamas on Oct. 7.
“The worst government in the history of Israel, the Netanyahu government, has crossed yet another line. And has brought us yet another, darker day,” Atzili said, before other demonstrators loudly chanted, “Shame, shame, shame.”
The news of the hostages’ discovery by the Israeli military rippled through the Washington region Sunday, prompting several local officials to reiterate calls for the Israeli government to negotiate a peace deal.
“Heartbroken and outraged to learn that Hersh Goldberg-Polin was murdered, along with five others, by Hamas,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) wrote in a social media post that referred to the 23-year-old Israeli American who was among the six recovered.
“Hersh’s murder, and the murder of the five others, underscores the urgency of a deal to bring the hostages home now,” Raskin wrote.
The others recovered were: Carmel Gat, 40; Eden Yerushalmi, 24; Alexander Lobanov, 32; Almog Sarusi, 27; and Ori Danino, 25.
In Virginia, Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) ordered that all flags be flown at half-staff on Tuesday to honor Goldberg-Polin, saying in a statement that he and his wife, Suzanne, were “angered and heartbroken” by the news.
Atzili, a member of the pro-Israel Democracy group UnXeptable, had a more personal connection to the discovery.
His cousin Aviv Atzili was killed on Oct. 7 and his body remains in Gaza; Aviv’s wife, Liat Atzili, was taken hostage by Hamas and released in November.
The demonstration outside the ambassador’s residence started to come together spontaneously late Saturday as local Israeli Americans and other Jewish residents were still learning that the hostages’ bodies had been recovered, he said.
“On WhatsApp groups, we started to say that we need to do something; it can’t be tolerated anymore,” Atzili said.
Rabbi Scott Perlo, who led a prayer in Hebrew to honor the six hostages, called their deaths a failure.
“These six holy souls who were slaughtered, who died, deserve so much more than prayer,” Perlo told the crowd. “The shame of this moment is not just that they were taken hostage and died brutally, but that there was such a deep, profound moral failure in the fact that they are not coming home alive to us today.”
