After six captives were killed in Gaza last Sunday, more than 200,000 Israelis flooded the streets demanding a deal to release those still in captivity. The country’s leading labor union, the Histadrut, took the rare step of calling for a general strike in wartime, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The general strike was called off within hours, leaving it with little impact, and the number of protesters has dwindled in recent days. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has reinforced his position that Israel cannot relinquish control of the Philadelphi Corridor between Egypt and Gaza — a key sticking point in negotiations for a ceasefire.

“The reasons Israel has not acted are complex — some of them purely political, even due to the peculiarities of parliamentary politics,” the paper says. “But they are also a reflection of the conflicting feelings within the Israeli public itself. There are two dominant sentiments in Israel: the desire to rescue the remaining hostages from the underground hell in Gaza, and the lack of trust in Netanyahu. At the same time, many fear that reaching an agreement with Hamas could eventually lead to the movement reconstituting its forces.”

“Israelis are really divided on this issue,” Yaakov Katz, a senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute, a Jerusalem-based think tank, told the newspaper. “On the one hand, our hearts bleed for the hostages.” Yet many Israelis believe that if the army were not in Gaza, Hamas would eventually rise from the rubble.

“When we’re not there, they come back and kill us again,” Katz said.

Netanyahu wants Israel to maintain a security presence along the Philadelphi Corridor, a 9-mile stretch of land along the border between Gaza and Egypt. Israel says the corridor has been used to smuggle people and weapons.

“You want to destroy Hamas’s military and governmental capabilities,” Netanyahu said Wednesday. “You cannot allow Hamas to rearm. That is clear. So you have to control the corridor.”

It is a position that resonates with many Jewish Israelis, the newspaper reported. On September 2, a poll conducted by the Jewish People Policy Institute found that 49 percent of Jewish Israelis said Israel should not give up control of the corridor even at the expense of a hostage deal, while 43 percent said it should.

Hamas released videos of the six hostages killed, saying they showed their final moments. In the videos, the hostages urge the Israelis to continue protesting against Netanyahu until a deal can be reached to return them home.

Netanyahu said Hamas's actions were all part of a psychological terror campaign aimed at pushing him to give in to the group's demands, an argument that will resonate with many Israelis.

The Wall Street Journal quotes Haviv Rettig Gur, a senior political analyst at the Times of Israel, as saying that “Israelis see no other option than to destroy Hamas.”

However, Netanyahu is not very popular. Despite this, his political position appears secure for the time being.

Israel’s parliament, or Knesset, is not in session, and the only way to bring down the government, unless Netanyahu dissolves it himself, is for members of his coalition to turn against him. They have little incentive to do so, however, given that polls show they will lose power.

“This is something that is very obvious to the British, Austrians and Latvians but may be difficult for Americans to see,” said Rettig-Gor. “In parliamentary systems, the less popular a politician is, the less likely it is that elections will take place.”

Most of Netanyahu’s coalition of right-wing, ultra-nationalist and religious political partners also agree with his position on negotiations and do not view the protesters on the streets as their constituents. In fact, they also know that many, if not most, of the protesters on the streets are the same people who marched in protests against his government’s judicial reform plan last year.

"Simply put, the issue of freeing the hostages has become highly political. Those who support the coalition agree with Netanyahu's position. Those who oppose him oppose his position," the newspaper says.

The newspaper quotes Dahlia Scheindlin, an expert on Israeli public opinion, as saying that Netanyahu and his coalition “are deeply aware of who the protesters are. They don’t care if they are the majority. They see them as a continuation of the 2023 democracy protests, and they don’t see them as their constituency.”

While Netanyahu seems consistently able to hold his coalition together, his opposition is not unified and “there are arguably two rival opposition leaders: Yair Lapid of the centrist Yesh Atid party and Benny Gantz of the center-right National Unity party. The opposition is also more diverse than the coalition. It includes left-wing, right-wing, centrist and Arab political parties,” the paper said.

“It is a very heterogeneous opposition, not a homogeneous coalition,” Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute, a Jerusalem-based think tank, told the newspaper.

The protests were certainly a show of anger and unusual for wartime. Since Sunday’s show of force, smaller protests involving thousands of people have erupted across the country in several locations. Another planned protest on Saturday could produce a large turnout.

But the numbers on the streets have not matched the demonstrations against the government’s plan to reform the judiciary last year. Most analysts believe the numbers on the streets would need to be much larger to create the kind of pressure that might prompt the coalition to turn on itself.

“You can’t put all the weight of responsibility on the protest movement — on angry, frustrated people who hold a sign and take to the street,” Yonatan Levy, a researcher at the Center for the Renewal of Israeli Democracy, a think tank in Israel, told the newspaper. “At a time when the leadership doesn’t really care what the public thinks, the protest movement’s ability to move things along is limited.”