{"id":403936,"date":"2026-04-21T20:05:11","date_gmt":"2026-04-21T20:05:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/403936\/"},"modified":"2026-04-21T20:05:11","modified_gmt":"2026-04-21T20:05:11","slug":"netanyahu-heckled-at-israels-official-memorial-day-ceremony","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/403936\/","title":{"rendered":"Netanyahu heckled at Israel\u2019s official Memorial Day ceremony"},"content":{"rendered":"

(JTA) \u2014 TEL MOND, Israel \u2014 Thousands of Israelis gathered in cemeteries all over Israel to commemorate the nation\u2019s fallen soldiers and terror victims on Memorial Day, as public mourning collided with political anger, fresh wartime uncertainty and the private aftershocks consuming bereaved families.\n<\/p>\n

In a Memorial Day message to bereaved families, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also addressed the war against Iran and its Lebanese proxy Hezbollah, saying Israel has \u201calready removed an existential threat.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

A short while later, President Donald Trump told CNBC\u2019s Joe Kernan that he \u201cexpects to be bombing\u201d Iran again if talks collapse ahead of Wednesday\u2019s ceasefire deadline.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tGet The Jewish Chronicle Weekly Edition by email and never miss our top stories
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/a>
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tFree Sign Up
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have returned all our hostages, struck our enemies hard, and made Israel a nation stronger than ever before,\u201d Netanyahu said at an official Memorial Day ceremony at Mount Herzl in Jerusalem.<\/p>\n

His comments prompted a heckler in the crowd to yell out, \u201cSome of them died in tunnels,\u201d in reference to the Israelis kidnapped to Gaza by the Hamas terror group and held underground.<\/p>\n

Skirmishes broke out during a speech by MK Ofir Sofer, of the far-right Religious Zionist party at the Kiryat Shaul military cemetery in Tel Aviv, when attendees attempted to snatch signs held up by protesters that read \u201cGovernment of death\u201d and \u201cI refuse to hear words of comfort from a government of criminals.\u201d<\/p>\n

At a cemetery in Tel Mond, Eyal Golan, whose sister Shirel died by suicide on her 22nd birthday<\/a>, a year after surviving the Nova massacre near the Gaza border, also had harsh words for the government.<\/p>\n

Reflecting on Knesset debates he attended after his sister\u2019s death, as he pushed for a law in her name to provide unlimited, comprehensive mental health care to victims of terror, Golan said he was furious at what he described as the performative behavior of politicians from both the coalition and opposition.<\/p>\n

\u201cOff camera, they speak to each other normally,\u201d he said. \u201cBut the moment the cameras turn on, it\u2019s showtime. They fall into their roles, shouting and attacking each other. I\u2019m sitting there thinking, how can this be real?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cInstead of coming together, they just deepen the divide,\u201d he said, but he credited two Knesset members from opposite sides of the political aisle \u2014 Moshe Gafni of United Torah Judaism and Merav Michaeli of Labor \u2014 with taking up the cause and advancing the legislation.<\/p>\n

Eyal and other members of his family say the government failed Shirel as she grappled with acute PTSD in the months after the attack. Now advancing the bill, he said he hopes it will spare other families the same fate.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe whole point of my crusade is to save others. No one will be able to bring back my sister. If I\u2019m able to save one more soul, I\u2019ve done my job,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The legislation, known informally as the Shirel Golan law<\/a>, passed a preliminary reading in January 2026.<\/p>\n

Sitting close to his daughter\u2019s grave, covered in flowers, wreaths and candles, Eyal\u2019s father Meir said he has fallen into a strange nightly ritual. Every night, he wakes up at 3 a.m. and makes himself a cup of coffee. He opens the smart TV to her YouTube account and for an hour or so watches the videos she had liked and subscribed to, including trance music emblematic of the Nova scene. At 4 a.m., he returns to bed.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs soon as I turn it on, it says, \u2018Hello Shirel, welcome back,\u2019\u201d Meir said, adding that it gives him a measure of tranquility, as if his daughter \u201cis still around.\u201d<\/p>\n

Later, as Eyal made the 45-minute drive back to his home in the central Israeli city of Holon, he described the journey as the emotional hinge between mourning and the return to ordinary life.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a kind of magic hour during which I store the grief of the day in a box in my mind,\u201d he said. \u201cBy Independence Day, I\u2019ll go back to my main role, being a father to two daughters.\u201d<\/p>\n

He added, \u201cThat journey is a microcosm of Israeli society.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meir\u2019s late-night visits to his daughter\u2019s digital world are part of a wider private language of mourning that has taken hold among bereaved Israeli families, many of whom continue to reach for their dead through screens. On phones across the country, especially on the popular messaging platform WhatsApp, parents and siblings keep sending messages to loved ones who were killed, writing as if the conversation never ended. The messages, some of which were recorded in a special Memorial Day project<\/a> by the Ynet news site, come at unguarded moments, during a football game, before a birthday, or in the middle of the night.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat a goal, Yahav,\u201d one father, Nir Maayan, wrote to his son, Yahav, who was killed in Gaza in January of last year.<\/p>\n

Texting his son from his graveside, Nir wrote: \u201cThere are days of collapse, of longing, of not being able to accept reality. Moments when I try to imagine your final moments. What did you think? What did you feel? Answers I will never know. So I just rest my head on you, and somehow you comfort me and hold me. Someone is watching over me from above.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTomorrow is your birthday, send mom a message,\u201d a sister wrote to her deceased brother.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe sky is beautiful today,\u201d another wrote.<\/p>\n

Dorit Ron keeps on texting her son Itai, who was killed on Oct. 7 at the Nahal Oz base near the Gaza border. \u201cI expect an answer, a sign that he\u2019s okay and with his father,\u201d she said, according to the report. \u201cEven though I know he won\u2019t reply, to me he\u2019s alive, just nearby, in another dimension.\u201d PJC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(JTA) \u2014 TEL MOND, Israel \u2014 Thousands of Israelis gathered in cemeteries all over Israel to commemorate the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":403937,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[85,46,43],"class_list":{"0":"post-403936","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-israel","8":"tag-il","9":"tag-israel","10":"tag-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403936","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=403936"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403936\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/403937"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=403936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=403936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=403936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}