17-year-old shot dead in southern Bedouin town Segev Shalom
No arrests reported in connection to killing of Bakr Muhammad Algrabaa; police suspect motive was criminal dispute, amid spate of Arab community homicides
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A 17-year-old was shot dead Friday in the Bedouin town of Segev Shalom, southeast of Beersheba, police said.
The Magen David Adom ambulance service said it was alerted of the minor’s injury at 4:30 a.m. Paramedics who arrived on the scene found him with penetrating wounds and declared him dead at the scene.
The victim, who was not immediately named, was later identified by Hebrew media as Bakr Muhammad Algrabaa of Segev Shalom. No arrests have been reported in connection to the shooting, the motive for which police said appeared to be a criminal dispute.
According to the Abraham Initiatives coexistence advocacy group, Algrabaa’s killing brings to 71 the number of Arabs in Israel who have died in violent circumstances since the beginning of 2024 — slightly fewer than the 75 who were killed over the same period in 2023, the bloodiest year on record for criminal killings in the Arab community.
The uptick in violence has been attributed to the proliferation of illegal weaponry in the community and rampant organized crime.
As recently as Thursday, 39-year-old Anan Yusuf was murdered in Haifa in front of his wife and children, in what police suspect was revenge for an attempt on the life of a senior figure in one of Haifa’s crime families.
In late April, human remains were discovered near the northern Druze-majority town of Rameh, which police later identified as belonging to two Arab men who were members of the Abu Latif crime family. Police suspect the two were killed while scouting on a rival gang.
Though crime had been on the rise for several years, the Abraham Initiatives’ 2023 year-end report pinned the blame for the soaring violence on Itamar Ben Gvir, the national security minister since December 2022. One of Ben Gvir’s first moves as minister was to scrap a plan put in place by his predecessor to combat Arab gangland violence by broadly beefing up law enforcement in the affected areas, and confiscating illegal firearms smuggled into Israel through Jordan and the West Bank.
The Times of Israel Community.