Father charged with murdering daughter over affair with Muslim
Sami Kara, a Christian Arab, allegedly killed teenager after she said she’d convert to Islam to be with her romantic partner
Stuart Winer is a breaking news editor at The Times of Israel.
Prosecutors filed charges Sunday against a man accused of stabbing his teenage daughter to death after she revealed that she planned to join her Muslim partner and convert to Islam.
An indictment was filed at Lod District Court against Sami Kara, 59, over the slaying of Henriette Kara, 18, who was found dead with multiple stab wounds in an apartment in the central city of Ramle last month.
The court papers revealed the strained relationship Kara had with her parents — reportedly from a Christian Arab family — who strongly opposed her relationship with her partner. Her partner, who was under arrest at the time of her death, was not named in Hebrew media reports nor were the circumstances of his detainment given.
In the months before she was killed, Kara had left home and gone into partial hiding, frequently moving from one location to another to elude her parents and other family members who demanded she end the relationship and return home.
In June, when Kara was staying with the mother of her partner, her uncle arrived at the premises and during a violent altercation smashed her cellphone, the indictment said. Kara’s father then arrived at the apartment in the early hours of the morning, also to demand she return home.
According to the indictment, Sami Kara threatened his daughter, slapped her, and shouted, “Just like I sat in prison [in the past] I will sit in prison my whole life, I don’t care.”
After police were called to intervene the father left.
A few days later, on June 12, the day after her high school graduation party, the younger Kara told a family member that her partner was due to be released from arrest soon and that she was going to convert to Islam and live with him.
The family member told her father, who went to the apartment where his daughter was staying at the time, allegedly bringing a knife with him. Confronting Kara, he is accused of fatally stabbing her twice in the neck and once in the shoulder.
Kara was found dead by Magen David Adom paramedics who were called to the scene by relatives and was declared dead at the scene.
Prosecutors asked that the accused be held under arrest until the end of proceedings.
Kara was a relative of new Supreme Court judge George Kara, Hebrew media reports said at the time of her death. He apparently learned of Henriette’s death during a special swearing-in ceremony at President Reuven Rivlin’s residence.
Joint (Arab) List lawmaker Aida Touma-Sliman, who heads the parliamentary committee on the status of women and gender equality, said following the killing that it was another sign of the “systemic failure of law enforcement and welfare authorities in dealing with these cases of murder.”
Kara’s death was the latest in a string of murders of Israeli-Arab women, many of which were believed to have been carried out by relatives. According to Touma-Sliman, over 15 women have been killed in the Ramle-Lod area in the past year, but only three men have been charged.
The killings have some similarities to the so-called “honor killings” elsewhere in the Muslim world, in which women are murdered by relatives for tarnishing the family name through perceived sexual indiscretions. But activists in Israel reject such comparisons, saying the vast majority of the killings are the result of rampant spousal abuse that has been ignored by police in a landscape rife with drugs, crime and poverty.
Though just one-fifth of the population, Arabs represent half of the women murdered in Israel each year.
Half of those women are killed in Arab neighborhoods of Ramle and Lod, cities just outside of Tel Aviv where several large clans involved in organized crime have made weapons easily accessible and allowed violence, particularly toward women, to go unchecked for years.
