23-year-old killed in suspected criminal car bombing in northern town

A 23-year-old man was killed when his car exploded in the northern town of Kiryat Bialik on Monday, in the latest suspected homicide of a particularly bloody first quarter of 2023.

The fatality was not immediately identified but is reportedly known to police, who were investigating the incident as a suspected assassination carried out by a rival crime family.

The Magen David Adom emergency service said its medics arrived at the scene while the victim’s car was still on fire. The man was rushed to a hospital in serious condition, but doctors were unable to resuscitate him and were forced to declare his death shortly after his arrival.

Police were investigating whether there was a connection between the Kiryat Bialik explosion and another apparent assassination attempt earlier in the day in the nearby town of Tirat Carmel.

In the earlier incident, a male driver and a female passenger managed to evacuate the vehicle moments before it went up in flames. The driver was also previously known to police, the Ynet news site reported.

The two incidents followed a string of criminal killings in Israel in recent weeks.

Over the weekend, 19-year-old Mehdi Hariri, whose father Hussam Hariri heads a well-known crime family, was killed while driving down the Route 6 highway. The Hariri family is in an ongoing conflict with the Bakri crime family and police are probing whether the murder was related to this.

In some of the recent incidents, last week, 22-year-old Holon resident Baruch Borochov was shot dead in an apartment in Rishon Lezion after a suspect managed to break inside. Borochov too is known to police due to his involvement in criminal gangs.

Days later, 26-year-old Moshe Ben Simhon, who was accused of being behind the 2018 murder of another prominent gang member, Yossi Shariki, was shot dead in the central town of Elad in an apparent revenge attack.

Later that day, 54-year-old Fuaz Abdel Latif was murdered in the northern town of Yasif in what police also believe was a revenge killing.

Also that night, 48-year-old Lior Greenberg was shot dead in Holon. Security footage recovered from the scene showed Greenberg turning around and looking at the suspect, who then fired at him. Another suspect then appeared at the scene and fired again to ensure that Greenberg was dead.

Greenberg was also known to police, and police have not ruled out a connection between the two Holon murders last week.

No arrests have been reported in any of the aforementioned cases.

The number of homicides committed in the first four months of the year was more than twice that of the same period last year — a sharp jump under National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who came into office in December and ran on a platform of improving citizens’ personal security.

Through the month of April, there have been 78 homicides this year, compared to 34 in 2022, according to a tally by Haaretz.

The sharp jump in killings has taken place in both the Jewish and Arab communities, although the violence has been far more severe in the Arab community.

There have been 60 homicides among Israeli Arabs this year compared to 26 last year; and 16 in the Jewish community compared to eight last year. The remaining two fatalities were foreign citizens.

So far, 11 women have been killed, nine of them in incidents of domestic violence.

Only three of the homicides in the Arab community have been solved while most of those in the Jewish community have been, excluding those tied to organized crime, Haaretz said.

Most of those killed were figures known to police due to their ties to the criminal world, apparently indicating an increase in organized crime in the Arab community, the report assessed.

A law enforcement official also pointed to the slowing down of a program launched in 2021 to counter crime in the Arab community, saying there was now almost no cooperation from local authorities.

The law enforcement official said that during the term of previous police minister Omer Barlev, there was a high number of homicides but the rate had at least slowed due to programs he had implemented.

“There was an effort by all parties. Since Ben Gvir came in, everything was abandoned and they started speaking in slogans,” said the unnamed source.

In the latest killings, on Monday, a young woman and her two small sons, including an infant, were found stabbed to death in their central Israel home in what was suspected to be among the most grisly domestic slayings the nation has seen in years.

The woman’s husband, aged around 30, was arrested a short time later on suspicion of killing the three, police said.

The three were found dead just after 2:30 a.m. by paramedics who arrived at a home in Taibe, an Arab city east of Netanya.

There they found the lifeless bodies of Bara’ah Jaber Masarwa, 26, and her two sons, Amir, 2, and Adam, just 6 months old. Her husband, who was not named, is suspected of killing the two children as they slept in bed and attacking his wife while she was in the kitchen.