Man shot to death in car amid wave of violence in Arab towns

A 39-year-old man was shot to death in an apparent drive-by in the village of Basmat Tab’un in the Galilee on Monday morning in the latest incident of violence to rock Israel’s Arab community.

According to Hebrew press reports, a second man in his twenties was also shot and moderately injured. Both were rushed to Rambam Medical Center in Haifa where the older man, identified as Mohammed Kamal Saadi, was pronounced dead.

According to news site Walla, police are looking into a possible link between Monday’s shooting and the killing of Ibrahim Saadi, the victim’s brother, in the same village several months earlier.

Police have opened an investigation into the incident, which occurred days after a man was shot to death Friday outside the northern town of Deir al-Asad.

Emergency personnel tried to treat the victim in Friday’s shooting, named Saturday as 60-year-old Jamal Ali Hasarma, but he was pronounced dead at the scene.

שני צעירים נפצעו מירי בבשמת טבעון הובאו לקבלת טיפול רפואי???? בכניסה לכפר איבטין.משה אויערבאך חובש באיחוד הצלה סיפר: "הענקנו סיוע ראשוני לשני הנפגעים ולאחר מכן הם פונו להמשך קבלת טיפול רפואי בבית החולים כשהאחד מצבו אנוש והשני מצבו מוגדר בינוני עד קשה". pic.twitter.com/89ZxQE8FYZ

— |فرات نصار|פוראת נסאר|FURAT NASSAR (@nassar_furat) December 30, 2019

Earlier this fall, large numbers of Arab Israelis participated in protests against violence in their communities, calling on authorities to take greater action to curb the phenomenon.

Arab leaders say the Israel Police largely ignores the violence in their communities, which includes family feuds and mafia turf wars, domestic violence and so-called honor killings.

In recent years, Arab Israelis have been involved in a significantly higher number of shootings than Jews. According to a 2018 State Comptroller report, the rate of gunfire-related violations was 17.5 times greater among Arabs than Jews from 2014 to 2016.

While many Arab Israeli politicians and activists maintain that the Israel Police has not taken sufficient action to crack down on violence in their towns, security officials have argued that they face challenges in gaining the trust of members of the community to aid their investigations.

On December 14, Joint List chairman Ayman Odeh declared the government responsible for the gun violence plaguing Israel’s Arab towns, stating that lawmakers were more interested in protecting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from his personal legal troubles than protecting Arab citizens’ lives.

Odeh said in a statement that following mass protests in the community, “a wide-scale program to combat violence” in the Arab community had been delayed because of the latest national election.

In late October, Netanyahu announced the formation of a committee to combat violence in the Arab community. But the status of the effort is unclear given the country’s third plunge into an election season in under a year.

Referring to the delay in the implementation of gun violence reform, Odeh said, “This is the result of a government that would rather protect the criminal who heads it than the civilians [endangered by] criminal organizations.”

The statement by the chairman of the majority-Arab Joint List came hours after a series of gun-related crimes in Arab towns.

Shots were fired early on December 14 at the home of the mayor in the Galilee city of Sakhnin. The assailants also set Mayor Safwat Abu Raya’s car on fire. That incident came on the heels of other recent attacks on Arab municipal leaders, including a shooting several days before at the home of the head of the Jadeidi-Makr local council that left a security guard moderately injured.