Foreign national found decapitated in Tel Aviv; woman shot dead near Kafr Qasim

Police arrested a man in Tel Aviv in connection with the murder of a foreign citizen whose headless body was found Thursday in the city’s south. Separately, a woman was shot dead in the central Arab town of Kafr Qasim.

The Tel Aviv murder victim, whose name has not been published, was about 30 years old, the Magen David Adom ambulance service said. According to Haaretz, he was a foreign national from an unnamed African country.

The murder scene was described by body retrieval service ZAKA as “extremely unusual,” with one volunteer calling it “cruel and devastating.”

The Kafr Qasim murder victim was identified in Arabic media as 28-year-old Tahlil Amer. A source familiar with the investigation was cited by Haaretz as saying the victim was shot while in her car, which then crashed into an adjacent wall.

She was discovered in her car in an olive grove outside town on Thursday, then taken to Petach Tikva’s Beilinson Hospital, where she was declared dead, police and medics said.

Four of Amer’s brothers, all in their 20s, were arrested Thursday night in connection with the murder. However, they were released on Friday due to a lack of evidence tying them to their sister’s murder.

According to Ynet, the case hit a dead end with the release of the four men, as there are currently no additional suspects.

Maintaining the innocence of Amer’s brothers, her family demanded in a statement on Friday that the police “get the murderers and uncover everything she (Tahlil) went through, from the moment she left the house until she was murdered.”

The Abraham Initiatives coexistence watchdog said Amer’s death brought to 226 the number of Arab citizens of Israel who have died as a result of criminal violence since the beginning of 2025.

The figure was up from 205 victims during the same period in 2024, and put 2025 on track to be the third straight year of a notable spike in homicides in the Arab community.

The period coincides with National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir’s time in office, at the start of which he gutted a plan his predecessor Omer Barlev put in place in cooperation with Arab municipal leaders to fight crime in the Arab community.

Amer is also the 21st Arab woman to have died in criminal violent circumstances since the start of 2025.

The Yodaat gender-based violence watchdog found in October that at least 38 women, including 18 Arab women, have been killed in gender-based homicides in Israel in 2025 as of last month.

It was the same number of women killed in such homicides in all of 2024, during which Ben Gvir slashed the government budget for a program to protect women at risk of domestic abuse.

That year had seen the highest number of women killed in gender-based homicides since 2017, the earliest year in Yodaat’s record.