Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, the hareidi-religious Jew who heads the Zaka emergency service, said Thursday that hareidi demonstrations will continue. Interviewed by Arutz 7, Meshi-Zahav said that the public does not recognize the dynamic under which the community acts. He explained that the community does not recognize the secular state and that demonstrations are the community's only vehicle for protesting what it sees as wrong. In addition, participants in the violence include youth who are not really part of the community.
In recent weeks, hareidi demonstrators have blocked the entrance to the Carta parking lot, just outside Jerusalem's Old City in protest of the municipality's operation of the lot to accomodate Jewish traffic on the Sabbath, which is prohibited under Jewish law. On Wednesday, Rabbi Tuvia Weiss called on the hareidim not to leave the confines of hareidi neighborhoods in the course of their demonstrations.
Meshi-Zahav believes the Sabbath-related demonstrations will continue, while others will not. Among those are demonstrations related to the arrest of a woman from the Mea Shearim neighborhood who is accused of starving her three-year-old son, and the need to hold an autopsy on the body of a man who was stabbed to death.