After 7 Arabs shot and killed over weekend, hundreds rally outside PM’s office

A few hundred protesters rallied outside the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem on Sunday, demanding action over the rocketing murder rate in the Arab community.

Many of the protesters held up photographs of members of the community who have been killed.

Since Friday evening, seven Arabs were killed in violent circumstances, the latest spate of killings in a larger crime wave that has claimed 223 lives this year so far.

The Democrats MK Gilad Kariv accused far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who oversees the police, of deliberately ignoring violent crime in Arab society as a matter of policy.

“This is not failure, it is a deliberate and planned act of neglect. Actual policy,” the lawmaker wrote on X.

Kariv paired law enforcement’s failure to deal with Arab-sector crime with far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s roadmap to impose Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank.

“Smotrich is leading the ‘decisive plan’ against the Palestinians. Ben Gvir is leading the ‘decisive plan’ against the Arab citizens of Israel,” he charged.

The protest and Kariv’s comment came after a particularly deadly weekend in which Amir al-Hawa was killed in north Tel Aviv; Hussein Samouni was killed in Jaffa; Mohammed Moghrabi and 16-year-old Walid Moghrabi were killed in Ramle; Abd al-Fattah Sabihat was killed in Ma’ale Iron; Murad Yousef was killed on Route 66 near the Tishbi junction; and Muath al-Hadra was killed in Jerusalem’s a-Tur neighborhood.

All seven were killed by gunfire. No arrests have yet been reported.

The Abraham Initiatives, a coexistence organization that tracks crime statistics, said that the weekend’s killing brought the number of Arabs killed in violent and criminal incidents in Israel since the start of 2025 to 223.

Of that number, it said, 189 were shot to death, 11 of them by police officers.

It said 112 of the victims were aged 30 and under, and five were below the age of 18. Twenty of the victims were women.

According to the organization, in the same time period last year, 204 people were killed in violent and criminal incidents, meaning there has been a 9 percent increase in 2025.

Police have failed to solve most murder cases in the Arab sector, allowing violent crime to go unpunished.

In addition to blaming police negligence, some Arab mayors say that their local police forces have not been provided with the resources they need, blaming Ben Gvir’s National Security Ministry.

Speaking to The Times of Israel last month, Rahat Mayor Talal al-Kernawi said the local police force was in dire need of more patrol cars, security cameras, and officers, with the ministry to blame for not providing such resources.

Ben Gvir’s first year in office, 2023, saw murder rates in the Arab community soar to their highest ever — roughly double the previous year. The minister had gutted a program put in place by his predecessor Omer Barlev and Arab municipal leaders to combat crime in the Arab community.

In a belated report earlier this year, Ben Gvir’s office confirmed that homicides in the Arab communities had more than doubled in 2023. His office has yet to release data for 2024.

In a statement issued following the protest, police stressed that it views violence within the Arab community “with the highest level of seriousness,” saying its forces have seized hundreds of illegal weapons and prevented planned assassinations, while also fighting financial crime in the Arab sector.

Police said that intimidation of residents by criminals has hampered their efforts to combat violence in Arab locales. “Violent crime cannot be defeated by police forces alone. Successful investigations depend on reliable evidence, witness and victim cooperation, and community trust,” police said.

“We call on the community to continue partnering with law enforcement, report violent offenders, provide information, and stand firmly against those who terrorize their own neighborhoods,” the force added.