A 19-year-old Israeli Arab woman has survived an attempted "honor killing" by her brother on Tuesday in the Arab village of Na'ura, near Afula, after two bullets fired at her head shattered on impact, failing to penetrate her skull.
Paramedics said the girl survived by playing dead, leading her brother to stop shooting and kicking her. He proceeded to dial emergency services, telling paramedics: "I just shot my sister."
The 24-year-old suspect was warmly praised by some members of his family for the attempted murder. He is in police custody.
The brother said his sister had been violating the family's honor for a "long time."
Using his younger brother's car, the suspect drove to the entrance of their village, making sure that his sister returned home shortly after midnight.
The victim was surprised to see her brother, police said, as the suspect ruthlessly proceeded to fire two shots at her head before landing brutal kicks all over her body to confirm that she was dead.
According to police, the attack had been carefully planned over a long period, and the suspect had informed his family of his murderous intentions. Family members who knew of the plot and cooperated with the suspect will also be arrested and charged in the near future, Afula police chief Dep.-Cmdr. Orly Malka told The Jerusalem Post.
"He simply stole a gun, fired a number of shots, kicked her, and stopped when he thought she was dead," Malka said. She added that her district had seen no major changes in the number of attacks against women among Arab families. "There has been a constant which hasn't changed in 100 years," Malka said.
Nurit Kaufmann, director of Violence Against Women at WIZO, which runs the National Hot Line for Battered Women and Children at Risk in partnership with the Social Affairs Ministry, said that this incident and the murder earlier in the week of a woman by her husband highlighted that the public had a long way to go in eliminating violence against women. She said that even mild signs of violence needed to be reported immediately.
"I can only urge women to report any form of violence against them to the professionals out there that have the tools to help," she said. "In both of these cases, if professional organizations had been involved we may have been able to prevent the terrible outcomes."
Kaufmann said that regarding honor killings specifically, much progress had been made in the Arab community to raise awareness of the phenomenon, but that this murder highlighted there was still much work to be done.
