A car plowed through a group of protesters against the judicial overhaul who were blocking a major Tel Aviv highway on Saturday night at the tail end of the city’s weekly mass demonstration. Five protesters were hit by an oncoming vehicle after they descended onto the Ayalon Highway near HaHalacha Interchange.
Over a hundred thousand protesters rallied across the country — 118,000 in Tel Aviv alone — for the 36th straight week Saturday against the coalition’s judicial overhaul legislation, days ahead of a key showdown at the Supreme Court next week.
A car plows into anti-overhaul protesters on Tel Aviv’s Ayalon highway on September 9, 2023. (Screen capture/Twitter)
This was not the first car-ramming to take place at an anti-overhaul protest this year, and opposition lawmakers said it was the result of incitement from the far-right government, whose members have come down hard on the demonstrators. Rani, who was among the protesters struck by the car, told Haaretz that the ramming had been deliberate. “All of the cars were stopped and then one of them accelerated in order to force its way through.”
On Saturday morning architect Yoav Anderman, a resident of Tel Aviv was detained for questioning by the police following the hanging of protest signs against fascist Minister of the Negev, Galilee, and National Security Yitzhak Wasserlauf his new neighbor in the building. The suspicion against him, as the police explained when they arrived at his home, is “vandalism of real estate.” Wasserlauf, a member of the racist Otzma Yehudit party, recently moved to a neighborhood in the north of the city. Groups of protesters called to come and support him outside the Central Tel Aviv police station, and dozens of protesters gathered outside the police station.
“Kaplan Force” protest movement in response to the arrest of Anderman said: “Tel Aviv police are trying to limit the right to demonstrate under the pretext of vandalizing real estate. This is another sign of the collapse of democracy under Netanyahu’s dictatorship.”
Related: https://maki.org.il/en/?p=31202
