38-year-old municipal engineer killed in northern Galilee shooting
Police open investigation into Jadeidi-Makr death, the11th fatal incident of violent crime in Arab Israeli community this year
A 38-year-old engineer from the northern Galilee was shot and killed in his car on Tuesday, according to Hebrew media reports.
The man, named by the Ynet news site as Adam Hamud from the northern town of Jadeidi-Makr, was taken in critical condition to Galilee Medical Center in Nahariya where he succumbed to his wounds.
Police opened an investigation into Hamud’s death, which was apparently related to criminal activity.
Hamud was reportedly employed as an engineer for the Jadeidi-Makr municipality.
Hamud was the 11th member of the Arab community killed this year. Two hundred and forty-four members of the community were killed in Israel in violent circumstances last year, over twice as many as in 2022.
Many Arab Israeli community leaders put the blame on the police, who they say have failed to crack down on powerful criminal organizations and largely ignore the violence, which includes family feuds, mafia turf wars and violence against women.
While there has been a drop in the crime rate since the outbreak of the war in Gaza, sparked by Hamas’s October 7 massacres, Hamud was the 11th member of the Arab community to be killed in violent crime this year, according to the Abraham Initiatives coexistence organization that tracks crime statistics.
The communities have also suffered from years of neglect by state authorities. More than half of Arab Israelis live below the poverty line, and their cities and towns often have crumbling infrastructure and poor public services. The minister in charge of police, Itamar Ben Gvir, has a long history of incendiary comments and stances against Arab Israelis, and the community’s leaders have argued that his policies have only intensified the epidemic of violence over the last year.
For their part, authorities have blamed burgeoning organized crime and the proliferation of weaponry, while some have pointed to a failure by communities to cooperate with law enforcement to root out criminals.
