State prosecutor urges tougher penalties for illegal firearms

State Prosecutor Shai Nitzan has urged prosecutors to be tougher on illegal firearms sales and demand jail time for both owners and dealers of unlicensed weapons and ammunition.

The recommended sentence for possessing a firearm without a license should be one to three years’ imprisonment, and for more serious crimes involving weapons or selling arms the prosecution should demand four- to six-year jail sentences, Nitzan wrote in a statement Sunday. Nitzan also proposed six months’ jail time or community service for those in possession of illegal ammunition, six to eight months’ incarceration for those carrying the ammunition, and half a year to a year’s imprisonment for selling it.

Nitzan also set out recommended jail terms for those carrying Molotov cocktails — six months to a year for possession, seven months to a year for carrying, and 10-30 months for selling the firebombs. For explosive devices, the prosecution was encouraged to seek seven years’ imprisonment for those in possession of bombs, eight years for carrying an explosive device, and 5-11 years for sales.

The harsher penalties for illegal weapons were recommended even for first-time offenders, though the statement said prosecutors should weigh the danger the weapon posed, where it was stored, and how many weapons were seized in each specific case.

Illegal firearms are prevalent in the Arab Israeli community, and Arab lawmakers have for years called on police to confiscate them.

“Since 2000, 1,100 Arab citizens have been killed in internal violence,” Joint (Arab) List member of Knesset Ahmad Tibi told The Times of Israel in January.

Israel’s intentional homicide rate is on the low side, at about 135 murders per year, or 1.8 murders per 100,000 people.

According to a July 2014 report by the Knesset Research and Information Center, Israeli Arabs constitute about 20 percent of the population but 49% of prison inmates.

Meanwhile, Israel’s Arab citizens are more afraid to leave their homes than are their Jewish counterparts: 51.9% of Israeli Arabs say they fear being the target of violent crime, whereas only 30% of the Jewish population says this. Murders in Arab Israeli communities are less likely to be prosecuted. In 2006–2013, 58% of murder cases in which the suspect was a Jew resulted in an indictment, whereas only 46% of the cases in which the suspect was Arab ended in an indictment, according to the Knesset report.