Tel Aviv on Friday hosted its first Pride parade in two years, with the municipality reporting over 100,000 people in attendance after urging marchers to “vote with your feet” for more rights.

The seaside parade followed a procession of eight floats sponsored by leading corporations and staffed, respectively, by the city’s LGBTQ community center, the Tel Aviv University students’ union and six leading lines of Pride parties.

With thumping music in the background, participants danced, cooled themselves with rainbow-pattern fans, and watched as performers — most of them scantily clad, muscular men — partied on the floats.

The seventh float, organized by the PAG TLV line, featured among its dancers trans model Uri Hashin, who had on Thursday led a 250-strong anti-bullying march down Tel Aviv’s Rothschild boulevard, where a gang of boys pelted her with stones last month.

Friday’s parade was secured by some 1,000 law enforcement officers, police said.

As the parade was getting started, police announced the arrest of a 37-year-old Haifa resident”amid concern of intent to harm participants of Pride Month events across the country,” after the unnamed man alluded in a social media post about needing to “annihilate” the “sick people.” Police said they would ask the Haifa Magistrate’s Court to extend the man’s detention.

People dance on a truck that leads the first Tel Aviv Pride parade in two years pic.twitter.com/DJLrLn0gpP — Noam Lehmann (@noamlehmann) June 12, 2026

People dance on a truck that leads the first Tel Aviv Pride parade in two years pic.twitter.com/DJLrLn0gpP

— Noam Lehmann (@noamlehmann) June 12, 2026

The figure of 100,000 participants cited by the Tel Aviv municipality marked a drop from past parades, with an estimated 250,000 attending in 2019 and 150,000 turning out at the last march in June 2023, months before the Hamas-led invasion of Israel and subsequent wars.

This year’s parade went ahead despite a roughly 12-hour exchange of fire between Israel and Iran starting Sunday night. The violence, renewed after a........

© The Times of Israel