2 Israelis charged for terror-related arson, shootings in Ramle aimed at scaring police

Two Israeli men, both residents of the central Israel city of Ramle, were arrested recently on suspicion of carrying out a series of terror-related attacks in the mixed Jewish-Arab city, including arson, firing weapons at residential buildings, and attempting to use explosive devices, the Israel Police and Shin Bet said in a joint statement Monday.

The two men, identified in the statement as Khalef Muhammed Hassin Abu Jhanem, 21, and Modi Akram Taleb Ganim, 20, were arrested in a joint operation between the Shin Bet and the Israel Police’s central command following a Shin Bet investigation.

The investigation, the law enforcement agencies alleged, found that the suspects had been deliberately targeting the properties and vehicles of Jewish residents in Ramle, in order to “send a message to security forces” and intimidate the police.

According to an indictment filed with the Lod District Court on Monday, the pair’s attacks were motivated by clashes between the police and members of Ganim’s family last year.

In December, prosecutors said, Ganim set fire to three vehicles, with the blaze later spreading to a fourth, on a street where Jewish families lived. During the same incident, he was alleged to have repeatedly fired a gun at a residential building, only stopping when the magazine was empty.

One of the bullets hit a kitchen inside the apartment building, prosecutors said.

In a separate incident, the indictment alleged, Ganim threw a grenade at a vehicle in a Jewish neighborhood in the city, but it failed to detonate.

The indictment also alleged that the defendants planned to attack the police directly with pipe bombs after learning how to make them from videos published on the social media platform TikTok.

The arrests were carried out amid a police crackdown on crime within Arab communities in Israel, where violent crime-related deaths have soared in recent years and show no sign of slowing down.

On Monday, a man was found dead, with signs of violence on his body, in the stairwell of a building in the southern town of Ofakim, prompting police to open an investigation and search for suspects.

According to Channel 12, the victim, a man in his 50s, was known to the police for a previous spate of drug-related offenses.

Hours earlier, in an unrelated incident, a woman in her 40s was killed by gunfire in the Bedouin village of Al-Atrash, also in southern Israel.

The woman’s husband has been arrested as part of the police investigation into her death.

Eighteen people from Israel’s Arab community have been murdered in the first 19 days of 2026, two of them women.

The toll comes on the heels of the deadliest year on record for Arab society in Israel, with 252 people having lost their lives in crime-related killings in 2025.