There is a word that Israelis have not used to describe their Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Yesterday it was everywhere: in red on handmade signs during protests that erupted across the country, in angry social media posts in Hebrew, and in the mouths of outraged citizens:

“Murderer.”

The verdict followed bitter news on what was supposed to be a joyous first day of school on September 1. Not only were six more Israeli hostages in Gaza found dead. The details of their deaths shook the country to its core. All six were killed just hours before Israeli soldiers found their bodies. The army said each died from multiple gunshot wounds to the head, apparently the result of execution.

Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23, Eden Yerushalmi, 24, Ori Danino, 25, Almog Sarusi, 27, Alex Lobanov, 32, and Carmel Gat, 40, survived nearly a year as hostages. When their bodies were discovered in a tunnel in southern Gaza, many Israelis blamed Netanyahu for their deaths, saying they would have been alive if the prime minister had agreed to a ceasefire and released them.

“I couldn’t believe it,” said Dudu Cohen, 73, who traveled with his wife from the West Bank settlement of Efrat to the protest outside the prime minister’s office in Jerusalem. “It’s terrible. If there had been an agreement last week, they would be alive.”

Something snapped for many Israelis on Sunday. The reaction to the deaths was spontaneous and widespread. Some half a million people took to the streets, demonstrating on bridges, blocking highways, marching through cities across the country in what may be the largest protests since Oct. 7. The country’s largest union, the Histadrut, called a strike Monday. Someone painted “Netanyahu is a murderer” on one of the prime minister’s cars.

“I directly accuse our prime minister of murder,” Ido Bruno, a professor of industrial design and former director of the Israel Museum, said over the chants of protest in Jerusalem. “Although Hamas pulled the trigger, Netanyahu issued the sentence. He executed them.”

Netanyahu claimed that “Israel is in intensive negotiations with a mediator to reach an agreement” to free the hostages. However, Israeli news channel Channel 12 News reported Friday that Netanyahu had abandoned the talks. During a meeting of Israel’s war cabinet on Thursday, Netanyahu reportedly told Defense Minister Yoav Gallant that keeping Israeli troops along the Gaza-Egypt border (known as the Philadelphia Corridor) was more important than saving the lives of the remaining hostages in Gaza. An argument ensued, with Gallant reportedly saying, “The meaning of this is that Hamas will not agree to this, so there will be no agreement and there will be no hostages,” to which Netanyahu reportedly replied, “That is the decision.”

While most of the world is preoccupied with the massive Palestinian death toll in Gaza, some 40,000 of whom have been killed, Israelis remain focused on the fate of 250 hostages taken into the enclave on October 7, when Hamas launched a surprise attack that killed some 1,200 people in Israel. Dozens of the prisoners were recovered in an earlier prisoner exchange and several in rescue operations, but some 100 people remain in Gaza, a third of whom are believed to be dead by Israeli authorities.

Bruno, like many other Israelis, blames Netanyahu for blocking a deal with Hamas to release them because it would provoke defections in the coalition government, which is based on far-right parties. “He has done everything in his power over the last 11 months to prevent any agreement,” Bruno said. “It is absolutely clear that his only interest is to continue the war as long as possible because that is the only way he can stay in power.”

The recent deaths of six hostages have exposed a deep rift in Israeli society between those who prefer to continue the military operation in Gaza and those who believe the state has a moral obligation, first and foremost, to bring home people who have been torn from their beds, the Nova festival or their workplaces.

“People won’t have peace until they impale (Hamas leader Yahya) Sinwar’s head on a stick, but it’s not worth the cost and it won’t happen anytime soon,” said Na’ama Kenan, a technical worker and mother of two, at a protest in Jerusalem. Kenan, 40, alternated between accompanying her husband: she attended the protest in Jerusalem while he looked after the children, and she looked after the children while he went to a protest in Tel Aviv. “I don’t understand how people got to the point where they think sacrificing people is just for every cause. Sacrificing soldiers, sacrificing hostages. I can’t understand it.”

In Tel Aviv, some 300,000 people came out to protest, carrying six “symbolic coffins.” They blocked a major highway and lit a bonfire in the middle of it. Police threw stun grenades and water cannons at the demonstrators and arrested 29 of them.

Einav Zangauker, the mother of Matan, who was kidnapped from a music festival, took the podium. Zangauker has been traveling from protest to protest for months, speaking at gatherings of dozens of people. On Sunday, she told hundreds of thousands of people that “Netanyahu is murdering hostages. He has decided to sentence them to death.”

Of the man she claims to have voted for, Zangauker said: “The history books will not have enough space to record the scale” of the disaster he has brought upon the country and its people. “Your time is over. I, Einav Zangauker, a Likudnik from Ofakim, tell you it is over.”

“Go to the streets, people of Israel. Go to the streets!”

They already did. In Jerusalem, thousands of people shouted and blew whistles and horns outside the prime minister’s office. “We will not give this security service a moment’s peace until all the hostages are released!” one man shouted through a megaphone, urging protesters to “Shout, shout, shout!” The mother of a hostage shared her suffering in a breaking voice: “This cannot continue, this is unrealistic, enough, ENOUGH!” A woman in a black dress sat on a large rock and sobbed.

Yuval Kaminsky maneuvered through the crowds, carrying his newborn daughter on his chest, while his wife, Yam Gal, held their 2-year-old son. Kaminsky, a filmmaker, saw the news as a watershed moment for Israelis, and wondered how a breakthrough could be achieved. “We’re terrified. We feel like we can’t go on like this anymore. Even though we’ve been doing this for a long time. We’re just waiting for an excuse to come out and end this once and for all. Because it won’t end unless people take to the streets.”

Yet amid the unity there was a sense of impotence, with public opinion unable to move the country’s political leadership for months. Kaminsky said it would take something extreme to bring about change. “We don’t need a wave of protests. We need one really, really big one… and some violence, I think. That’s what’s happening, apparently,” he said. “I don’t think I’m an advocate of physical violence, but… it has to be aggressive, very aggressive. Destroy property.”

Among the dead were two hostages who have become icons of Israel: Hersh Goldberg-Polin and Carmel Gat. Hersh, an Israeli-American man who was seen in the backseat of a Hamas pickup truck with his hand torn off on Oct. 7, was thought to be presumed dead until Hamas released footage of him alive in April. His photos are everywhere in Jerusalem, hanging from balconies and covering bus stops. His mother, Rachel, has become an international ambassador for the hostage families, calling on the government to make a deal to save the nation and her son. Carmel Gat was taken hostage from Kibbutz Be’eri and taught other hostages yoga and meditation to help them survive their captivity.

“People felt very close to Hersh and Carmel without knowing them,” Bruno said. “It touches you in a different place. We can’t bear to think that we know these people lived and could still be alive.”

Cohen, a settler, is among a handful of Israelis who believe Israel should have accepted Hamas’s Oct. 7 offer to exchange all hostages for all Palestinian prisoners and detainees in Israeli jails. “I think we should have told them on Oct. 8 that they had hit us and that we were willing to make a deal with all of theirs for all of ours,” Cohen said. “And then we had to find an opportunity to hit them, as we should when the hostages come back to us. There’s always an opportunity to hit them. Hostages are something that doesn’t last.”