Thousands protest in Tel Aviv

Tel Aviv - At Rabin Square in Tel Aviv protesters have smashed windows of banks and blocked a major highway in response to the arrest of a dozen activists.

According to Haaretz and RT the protest consisted of some 6,500 people who were protesting the arrest of Daphni Leef on Friday. Leef was the leader of the social protest movement which spearheaded wide scale demonstrations across Israel protesting the rising cost of living in the country. Leef had been arrested with a dozen other protesters following her attempt -- with several other activists -- to pitch tents along Rothschild Avenue in the center of Tel Aviv -- which had previously represented a kind of focal point for the previous summer 2011 protest. When she was arrested several hundred of her fellow demonstrators tried to stop the police car from driving off by blocking it, they also shouted denouncements of the mayor of Tel Aviv Ron Huldai and the country's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The police continually assert that the latest outbreak -- which has seen protesters smash windows, block a major highway and trying to overrun police lines in their attempts to march from Habima Square to Rabin Square -- of protests and their convergence in central Tel Aviv in such a manner is illegal and not permitted. The demonstrators out at present are asserting that the government is acting like a police state by using such 'repressive' means and attempting to prevent the reestablishment of the sit-in encampments that saw hundreds of thousands of Israelis stage sit-ins in social justice protests.