Three men killed in highway shooting that police link to blood feud

Three men were killed in a highway shooting in central Israel Tuesday night, in an incident police said was linked to a blood feud between warring crime families.

The victims, in their mid-20s from the central Arab Israeli town of Tira, were in a car when assailants shot at them. They apparently tried to escape, and a chase developed until the victims lost control of their vehicle and collided with a bus driving on the highway near Sde Warburg. No injuries were reported on the bus, but the impact appeared to destroy half of the car and crush its passengers.

The three were without vital signs by the time firefighters managed to pull them from the vehicle. Paramedics declared them dead at the scene.

The Abraham Initiatives, which tracks Arab homicide victims, named them as Asil Kassem, Hadi Nassar, and Jubran Nassar.

Police forces launched a major manhunt for the perpetrators after reaching the scene and soon arrested three suspects, also from Tira.

“The triple homicide tonight should shock the entire country,” the Initiatives said in a statement.

According to the group, 32 members of the Arab community have died in violent crime since the beginning of the year.

“Arab citizens are being murdered en masse on the streets every day,” it said in a statement.

The Kan public broadcaster, citing a senior police official, reported that the shooting was part of a deadly war between the Nassar and Hariri crime families.

“Once again, we are witness to murder against the backdrop of a long and bloody feud that could have been prevented if the justice system would enable police to use the tools it has in order to eradicate the phenomenon and root out the criminals from society,” the unnamed official said.

The source urged easier use of administrative detention — the controversial policy of holding suspects without charge — saying it would have enabled the prevention of murders.

Opposition MK Gilad Kariv, who is a member of the Knesset National Security Committee, in a post to X wrote that Israel is “abandoning 2 million Arab citizens to organized crime, to tens of thousands of illegal weapons, to a power vacuum, to a crumbling police force and to indifferent and heartless politicians.”

Hours before the triple death, a 26-year-old Arab Israeli man was shot dead in I’billin, in the second such incident in the northern town in under a day.

Last year was Arab society’s deadliest year on record, having seen 252 people were killed in crime-related incidents. Many Arab leaders accuse law enforcement of neglect.

The proliferation of deadly crime has sparked protests in Arab cities and towns over the past two weeks, which reached a high point over the weekend with a mass Arab-Jewish protest in Tel Aviv demanding the government rein in the violence.

Critics have blamed National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who oversees police, for the worsening situation. Since he took office in 2023, the homicide rate in Arab society doubled and has continued to rise since.

According to data from the Abraham Initiatives, only 32 indictments were filed last year against suspects in Arab society killings. The group said the data is evidence of chronic under-policing when it comes to the community and “points to fundamental discrimination in enforcement.”

The Nassar and Hariri feud has seen murders both inside and outside Israel. In 2023, Shaufik Nassar, an Israeli citizen in his mid-30s, was shot in Cape Town, South Africa.

The death of Nassar, a resident of Tira, came almost a year after his cousin Abdel Fattah Nassar was also shot and killed while visiting Cape Town.