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Hundreds of female students were barred from entering schools across Israel on Wednesday after putting on short shorts in protest over discriminative and sexist dress code.
The protest comes after a group of girls from from the Alon Middle School in Ra'anana in central Israel were barred on Monday from entering school grounds because they were wearing shorts, despite the fierce heatwave hitting the country.
The protest began in Ra’anana where the initial incident occurred and spread to the central cites of Kfar Saba, Modi’in, Gedera and others.
On Tuesday, dozens of school girls from The Hefer Valley Regional Council arrived at school wearing short shorts in protest and had been banned from entering the premises.
Some 150 students from Darca Menachem Begin High School in Gedera who initially had been barred from entering their classrooms, were allowed to rejoin their classmates after persistently waiting outside for three hours.
"The feeling is that we have won," 10th grader, Netael Barak, told Ynet. "We’ve been called for a meeting with the school principal on Sunday and we have already received letters warning us about a suspension,” she added.
“Will they suspend 150 girls? I don't know. But the issue is on the agenda and they’re talking about it."
Sixteen-year-old Shira Bendelman from Yitzhak Navon School in Modi'in said she and her classmates had been told to go home and change, but they waited outside the school grounds for hours.
“Every year we talk to the management [about the dress code] who only laugh at our faces,” she said. “A lot of teachers didn't even understand what we were doing."
In the Alon Middle School where the protest started, a teacher stood at the entrance to the school and sent any girls whose shorts were deemed too short to the library, without being allowed to enter the classrooms.