Police statistics: Almost 75% of Israeli murder victims are Arab citizens

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Almost three-quarters (73%) of all Israeli murder victims in the last few years have been Arab citizens, according to police statistics covering the period between 2018 and 2023. For comparison, about one-fifth of the Israeli population are part of the Arab-Israeli community.

The Association for Freedom of Information published the new data, which revealed that a whopping 712 of 981 Israeli citizens murdered in the period between 2018 - 2023 were Arab citizens, the Ynet news outlet reported last week. The majority of perpetrators were Arab Israelis.

The overwhelming majority of the victims were men. However, 82 Arab women were murdered during the period compared to 56 Israeli Jewish women.

The report showed the geographical distribution of the recorded murders, with 229 Arab Israelis murdered in northern Israel, which is home to over half of the total Arab-Israeli population. In addition, 176 Arab-Israelis were murdered in the central part of the country, 44 in the south, and 36 in Jerusalem and the surrounding area. Furthermore, data showed that many of the victims were murdered in cities with a mixed Jewish and Arab population, such as Haifa in the north, and Ramla or Lod in central Israel.

Shahira Shelbi, who heads the “Abraham Initiatives,” an NGO dedicated to equality between Arabs and Jews in Israeli society, was not surprised to see the level of crime recorded in mixed cities.

"It is not surprising that the mixed cities star on this list," Shelbi said. "The Arab population in these cities suffers from neglect and discrimination. The education and housing systems are not good and crime is not new there. We know that the crime families grew out of these cities. At first, they were part of the Jewish crime families and over the years they became independent."

The number of Arab murder victims decreased during COVID pandemic lockdowns in Israel and during the previous Bennett-Lapid government, which made an active effort to combat the societal phenomenon. However, the number of Arab victims has been on the rise since the pandemic and during the current Netanyahu coalition government.

Following growing pressure to intervene, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced in August 2023 that Israel’s Shin Bet security agency would join the fight against the growing crime within Arab Israeli society.

However, so far, the number of Arab murder victims has continued to grow. The issue is largely attributed to inadequate policing in Arab Israeli communities and the prevalence of illegal firearms controlled by local Arab criminal gangs. Some pundits have warned that, if not addressed, the current violence between Arabs in Israel could potentially spill over to Israel’s Jewish population.

Shelbi noted that the number of murdered Arab Israeli women has been on the rise in recent years.

"The number of murdered women in Arab society has increased in recent years, even though we are encountering less and less cases of murder that were once defined 'on the grounds of family honor' as was the custom in the past," Shelbi said.

"We used to see cases where a man murdered his partner, for example, due to a divorce dispute, but that has changed. Today, instead of the partner murdering them, he hires a killer for a few thousand shekels to do it," she added.

Discrimination and socio-economic poverty tell part of the story of why Arab Israelis are greatly overrepresented in the nation's crime statistics, both as victims and perpetrators. However, some experts argue that addressing the problem will also require a dramatic change in education, culture, cooperation and values within the more traditional Arab-Israeli society.