150 Arab citizens murdered in 2025 as violence tears at Arab society

Israel is poised to roughly match or exceed an all-time high in Arab homicides this year, with 150 Arabs murdered as of August 12, according to Israel Police. Nazarath’s Radio Nas, put the toll at 162 on August 19.

Members of Israel’s Arab minority make up about 20% of the country’s population, and traditionally, they have faced poverty and discrimination. But the deaths and violent crime surging in recent years are fraying the very fabric of Arab society.

Fatalities have risen every year since then, leaving many Arabs – and left-wing Jewish critics – surmising that Ben-Gvir is simply racist and content with Arabs killing one another.

Ben-Gvir, for his part, has accused, without providing evidence, Arab leaders of backing criminal organizations.

“It’s not just the murder itself; there are other tragedies you don’t hear about in the media and more layers of victims,” Deiaa Haj Yahia, author of a recent book on the carnage and crime organizations, Blood on the Streets, told The Jerusalem Report.

“People are forced to pay protection and are threatened for no fault of their own. For example, simply because their cousin is in dispute with another family. The result is that you have people staying at home, hiding, not going out, and losing their work and livelihoods. We are a society in trauma.”

“But the main reason is the place of Arab society in overall Israeli society and its underdevelopment,” he said, adding that “a lot has to do with the police not functioning well when it comes to the Arab citizens.”

The toll has included people being murdered by car bombs, abducted from their homes and shot, and even children getting gunned down by the crime families battling for protection, money, and power.

In recent months, there has been a slight remission in the murder rate, though Be’eri Sulitzeanu said it is hard to say why.

Since much of the carnage takes place in crowded streets and open areas, many bystanders witness the murders or hear the shots and become trauma victims, suffering symptoms including loss of the will to live and flashbacks, said Haj Yahia.

Two years ago, the government opened its first – and thus far only – center in northern Israel to address treatment, prevention, and community aspects of the deterioration. It is the Community Resilience Center-Wadi Ara, part of the Israel Trauma Coalition and working in cooperation with the Umm el-Fahm municipality.

It gets high marks for the services it provides and is widely seen as having a positive impact on individuals and the community. But supporters, observers, and even staffers agree it cannot come anywhere close to meeting the needs or address the overall problem, something Be’eri Sulitzeanu said requires a comprehensive governmental effort and transformation of police policies.

The center offers group and individual therapy on its premises or via Zoom (for those who fear leaving their homes), trains community workers, and is active at the neighborhood level.

It also boosts readiness for wars and other emergencies, and works with schools to prevent youth from falling into the cycle of crime, said Dima Khalifa, the director of the center. She is a 36-year-old psychologist educated at Tel Aviv University and Ben-Gurion University, originally from Umm el-Fahm. She knows all too well what the clients go through.

There have been 10 homicides in the city since the beginning of the year, the last one in July, according to the municipality. Last year’s horrors included a combined ramming and shooting attack that caused 15 people to seek treatment at the center.

“Our situation is more frightening than war,” explained Khalifa in an interview in her office.

“In war, at least for a missile you get a warning on your phone, and there is a siren. I know to be in the protected space. At least I can do whatever I’m able to do. But with gunfire, you never know when it will be coming.”

Like many parents, she and her husband sometimes discuss moving from Umm el-Fahm to raise their children in a safer place, Khalifa said

For treatment, the center uses a method known as SEE FAR CBT, which combines principles of cognitive behavioral therapy with use of the imagination, treatment cards and gradual exposure to the traumatic memory.

“The damage is always ongoing, and there is no model that fits our situation one hundred percent,” Khalifa said. “As professionals and care-givers, we have to develop models or knowledge or research that are our own.”

One of the most challenging aspects of the center’s work is its attempts to prevent youth from falling into the culture of crime and gangs at school. Khalifa said that the intervention needs to take place very early, in seventh or eighth grade.

“It’s a group treatment, with eight to 10 people. Of course it depends on the needs and backgrounds. First you have to create a safe space for these children, a place where they can be as they are without judging them, without telling them they are not alright; a clean place where they can be themselves. It’s not easy. Usually these are children who drop out of school, don’t show up, and are hard to bring into treatment,” she said.

Some of the groups dissolved because the children stopped coming, Khalifa said. But, she stressed, “we did succeed with 16 other groups where the children came, and the counselors were shocked to see that children who in the first meeting did not want to listen continued to come and even asked for more meetings after we finished our limit.”

The center is funded by the ministries of social equality and welfare at just NIS 1.9 million a year, according to the municipality of Umm el-Fahm. It employs 15 therapists to cover a population of almost 300,000 Arab citizens from 10 localities in northern Israel.

Ofer Toder, director-general of the Umm el-Fahm municipality, praised the center for “wonderful work” and criticized the government for under-funding it. The relevant ministries did not respond to queries for this article.

“It is really strengthening at the clinical level that someone who, for example, has had his car set on fire has people who will counsel him and help him,” Toder said, adding, “the center’s strengthening of the community is critical.”

He said the municipality is doing its best to boost safety, including by organizing sulha (reconciliation) committees and installing more lighting across the city. But police will have to significantly lift a very low crime-solving rate and earn the community’s trust for substantial improvement to begin, he said.

But the government wants its own solution, the one preferred by Ben-Gvir. The controversial plan is that the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency), best known for its often clandestine operations in the West Bank and Gaza, will also focus on Arab areas of Israel, helping to bring to bear, in the words of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “the best tools available to the state, including advanced means and intelligence capabilities” to strike at Arab criminal organizations.

The funding for this will be diverted from Arab development budgets intended to bridge socioeconomic gaps and alleviate poverty that have already been heavily cut or stalled in recent years. For Haj Yahia, such an approach seems dangerous for Arab citizens, and Toder views it as very misguided.

“Vocational training that prevents crime is not the place you want to be cutting,” he said.

“The Israel Police takes every murder and incident of violent crime with the utmost seriousness. Detectives and operational units are working around the clock to investigate these incidents, prevent further violence and combat organized crime and the proliferation of illegal weapons throughout Israeli-Arab communities,” the police said.

The statement said that police conduct “extensive intelligence and operational activity against organized crime and criminal networks operating within Israeli-Arab communities,” and added that Police Commissioner Daniel Levy “has been holding ongoing meetings with community leaders working to strengthen cooperation and develop coordinated responses to the challenges facing Israeli-Arab communities.”■