Leftist protesters are back in full swing this week, blocking highways across the country after calling for a week of protests in a call for elections. On Monday evening, violent protesters broke through the barricades at the prime minister’s home in Jerusalem, clashed with police, and lit a fire.

Likud MK Nissim Vaturi was asked about the protests in an interview with Kol B’Ramah on Tuesday morning and he responded by calling them “an arm of Hamas.”

He explained: “Hamas has several arms – the combat arm of the heinous terrorists who attacked and killed children and the arm of the protests that support and help Hamas. After all, who benefits from this pressure in a more violent and brutal way than Hamas? There are people who care about the country – and it is not those who are shouting at the Kaplan protests. We know that they don’t care about anything because who protests in such a way during a war?”

His comments were immediately slammed by leftists and even his fellow Likud MKs. In response, Vaturi partially walked back his comments, writing on X that the protests “harm our national resilience, especially during wartime – so we heard in the investigations of terrorists who said that what encouraged them to attack Israel were the protests. The horrific acts of the Hamas Nazis are not fit to be compared to any protest or political acts.”

Vaturi later apologized in a Knesset meeting if his comments hurt anyone, saying that “no one can be compared to Hamas.”

It should be noted that former Shin Bet senior official Shalom Ben-Chanan said the same thing as Vaturi on Tuesday morning on Channel 12, saying: “It’s impossible to ignore the fact that this story helps our enemies and gives them a boost. Yahya Sinwar sits and says: ‘I’m very encouraged. Israeli society is being dismantled from within.'”

(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)