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After police clash with Tel Aviv protesters who blocked highway, Netanyahu likens demonstrations to settlers who rioted
(JTA) — In a defiant televised address, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu compared protesters of his government’s proposed judicial overhaul to the West Bank settlers who recently rioted in a Palestinian village, burning houses and cars.
Netanyahu, speaking for about seven minutes shortly after 8 p.m., warned that the protesters were crossing “red lines” and would themselves face retaliation, without elaborating on what shape it might take.
His remarks came after what protesters billed as a “day of disruption,” in which demonstrations blocked roads across the country, including a central highway in Tel Aviv. Police fired stun grenades, water cannons and tear gas at protesters, and at least 11 were hospitalized. Dozens of protesters were arrested.
Later in the day, including during Netanyahu’s speech, a crowd of protesters surrounded a hair salon in an upper-class neighborhood where Sara Netanyahu, the prime minister’s wife, was getting a haircut. The crowd kept the salon surrounded for hours, until a convoy of Israeli border police came to evacuate her from the building.
Netanyahu alluded to the crowd surrounding his wife in his speech and likened the protesters to the settlers who rioted in the Palestinian village of Huwara after a Palestinian killed two Israelis there. The settler rioters injured dozens of Palestinians, and a Palestinian man was killed amid the riots in another village.
“In Huwara, in the face of the horrific murder of two wonderful brothers, I said to the lawbreakers, we will not tolerate a situation in which ‘every man does that which is right in his own eyes,’” Netanyahu said, quoting a biblical passage. “And I say it again to the lawbreakers who crossed red lines in Tel Aviv today, we will not tolerate a situation in which ‘every man does that which is right in his own eyes.’”
Netanyahu added, “We cannot accept violence, we cannot accept attacks on police officers, we cannot accept blocking roads, we cannot accept threats toward public figures and their family members, something that is happening at this very moment in the heart of Tel Aviv.”
Later in the speech, he added, “If you erase the red lines on one side, they will be erased on the other, and the path to chaos is very quick,” he said.
Benny Gantz, one of the opposition leaders, called for talks under the aegis of President Isaac Herzog, who has offered to mediate, as did four influential Knesset members. Netanyahu did not mention those appeals in his speech.
Leaders of Israel’s parliamentary opposition came out in support of the protests — and some also called on protesters to let Sara Netanyahu leave the salon. Labor Party leader Meirav Michaeli, a Netanyahu opponent, also noted that police arrested more protesters in Tel Aviv than rioters in Huwara.
“Huwara was a terrorists’ pogrom,” Opposition Leader Yair Lapid, the head of the Yesh Atid Party, tweeted after Netanyahu’s speech. “How can Netanyahu compare that to members of [Israeli commando unit] Sayeret Matkal, to Apache pilots, to army reservists, to doctors and students, to people that came out today to the street? These are the best people in the country.”
For weeks, protesters have been turning out in the streets in the hundreds of thousands in a bid to stop the advance of legislation that would gut the courts of their independence. Pieces of that legislation were approved in a committee vote on Wednesday, moving one step closer to passage. The proposed overhaul would enable a majority of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, to override Supreme Court decisions, and would give the government full control over appointments to the court.
Most of the protests are coordinated with the police, and there have been minimal arrests until Wednesday.
In his speech, Netanyahu also favorably compared protests by right-wing activists in 2005, when a centrist government evacuated settlements from the Gaza Strip, to today’s demonstrations. “That struggle did not cross red lines,” he said. “We did not see then what we see today. Those protesters did not attack police officers, did not call for civilian uprising, did not call for refusal [of military service], nor to take their money out of the country. They did not slander Israel in the world.”
In fact, around the time of the Gaza withdrawal, there were attacks on policemen, protests that blocked roads and calls on soldiers to refuse orders to evacuate settlements.
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UK PM Starmer Says There Could Be New Powers to Ban Pro-Palestinian Marches
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer gives a media statement at Downing Street in London, Britain, April 30, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Jack Taylor/File photo
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the government could ban pro-Palestinian marches in some circumstances because of the “cumulative effect” the demonstrations had on the Jewish community after two Jewish men were stabbed in London on Wednesday.
Starmer told the BBC that he would always defend freedom of expression and peaceful protest, but chants like “Globalize the Intifada” during demonstrations were “completely off limits” and those voicing them should be prosecuted.
Pro-Palestinian marches have become a regular feature in London since the October 2023 attack by Hamas on Israel that triggered the Gaza war. Critics say the demonstrations have generated hostility and become a focus for antisemitism.
Protesters have argued they are exercising their democratic right to spotlight ongoing human rights and political issues related to the situation in Gaza.
Starmer said he was not denying there were “very strong legitimate views about the Middle East, about Gaza,” but many people in the Jewish community had told him they were concerned about the repeat nature of the marches.
Asked if the tougher response should focus on chants and banners, or whether the protests should be stopped altogether, Starmer said: “I think certainly the first, and I think there are instances for the latter.”
“I think it’s time to look across the board at protests and the cumulative effect,” he said, adding that the government needed to look at what further powers it could take.
Britain raised its terrorism threat level to “severe” on Thursday amid mounting security concerns that foreign states were helping fuel violence, including against the Jewish community.
“We are seeing an elevated threat to Jewish and Israeli individuals and institutions in the UK,” the head of counter-terrorism policing, Laurence Taylor, said in a statement, adding that police were also working “against an unpredictable global situation that has consequences closer to home, including physical threats by state-linked actors.”
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War Likely to Resume After Trump’s Rejection of Latest Proposal, Says IRGC General
Iranians carry a model of a missile during a celebration following an IRGC attack on Israel, in Tehran, Iran, April 15, 2024. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
i24 News – A senior Iranian military figure said that fighting with the US was “likely” to resume after President Donald Trump stated he was dissatisfied with Tehran’s latest proposal, regime media reported on Saturday.
The comments of General Mohammad Jafar Asadi, one of the top Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commanders, were relayed by the Fars news agency, considered as a mouthpiece of the the powerful paramilitary body.
“Evidence has shown that the Americans do not not adhere to any commitments,” Asadi was quoted as saying.
He further added that Washington’s decision-making was “primarily media-driven aimed first at preventing a drop in oil prices and second at extricating themselves from the mess they have created.”
Iranian armed forces are ready “for any new adventures or foolishness from the Americans,” he said, going to assert that the Iran war would prove for the US a tragedy comparable with what was for Israel the October 7 massacre.
“Just as our martyred Leader said that the Zionist regime will never be the same as before the Al‑Aqsa Storm operation [the name chosen by Hamas leadership for the October 7, 2023 massacre in southern Israel], the United States will also never return to what it was before its attack on Iran,” he said. “The world has understood the true nature of America, and no matter how much malice it shows now, it is no longer the America that many once feared.”
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Trump Says US Navy Acting ‘Like Pirates’ to Carry Out Naval Blockade of Iranian Ports
A view of Iranian-flagged cargo ship M/V Touska as the US Navy Arleigh Burke-class Aegis guided missile destroyer USS Spruance conducts its interception in a location given as the north Arabian Sea, in this screen capture from a video released April 19, 2026. Photo: CENTCOM/Handout via REUTERS
President Donald Trump said on Friday the US Navy was acting “like pirates” in carrying out Washington’s naval blockade of Iranian ports during the US and Israel’s war against Iran.
Trump made the comments while describing the seizure by US forces of a ship a few days ago.
“We took over the ship, we took over the cargo, we took over the oil. It’s a very profitable business,” Trump said in remarks on Friday evening. “We’re like pirates. We’re sort of like pirates but we are not playing games.”
Some of Tehran’s vessels have been seized by the US after leaving Iranian ports, along with sanctioned container ships and Iranian tankers in Asian waters.
Iran has blocked nearly all ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz apart from its own since the start of the war. Trump has imposed a separate blockade of Iranian ports.
The US and Israel attacked Iran on February 28. Iran responded with its own strikes on Israel and Gulf states that host US bases. US-Israeli strikes on Iran and Israeli attacks in Lebanon have killed thousands and displaced millions.
The war has raised oil prices and led to the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint for about 20 percent of global oil and liquefied natural gas shipments.
Trump, who has offered shifting timelines and goals for the war that remains unpopular in the US, has faced widespread condemnation over his comments on the conflict, including when he threatened to destroy Iran’s entire civilization last month.
Many US experts said last month that American strikes on Iran may amount to war crimes after Trump threatened to target civilian infrastructure.