Arab clan violence killed a record 252 Arab Israeli citizens in 2025, the deadliest year on record for the community. Tens of thousands filled the streets of Sakhnin in January 2026 to protest, and Police Commissioner Daniel Levi declared Arab-sector crime a state of national emergency the following month.
The consequential story runs beneath those headlines. In towns from Lod to Umm al-Fahm, organized families act as de facto authorities, collecting protection money, settling disputes through their own courts, and answering the state with armed drones launched from across the Egyptian border. Israel’s public debate has framed the issue as either police neglect or community dysfunction. Both readings miss what the data keep showing, which is that rule of law itself is being corroded on both sides.
A Year That Reset the Record
The Abraham Initiatives, an Israeli coexistence group that now tracks Arab-sector homicides in detail, counted 252 Arab citizens murdered across 218 criminal incidents in 2025, an increase of roughly 10 percent over the 230 killed in 2024. The vast majority, 88 percent, were killed by gunfire. A record 23 women were killed, and roughly 5 percent of the victims were minors. The bulk of the dead, 141 of 252, were killed in the north, including Haifa, with 72 in the central region around Tel Aviv and 35 in the south.
- 252 Arab citizens murdered in 2025
- 309 total homicide victims nationwide, 241 of them Arab, 47 Jewish (Knesset, February 2026)
- 23 Arab women murdered, the highest count on record
The official police count, presented to the Knesset National Security Committee by Israel Police spokesperson Lior Abudraham, lands slightly lower than the civil-society tally: 309 total homicide victims in Israel in 2025, with 241 in the Arab sector and 47 in the Jewish sector, the remainder foreign nationals. Arabs make up roughly 21 percent of Israel’s population, the Central Bureau of Statistics reports, yet they accounted for the vast majority of the year’s homicide victims. The full sector breakdown is laid out in Israel Police’s 2025 homicide breakdown by sector. Police counted 46 women murdered in the year, 26 of them Arab and 17 Jewish, and 112 attempted murders that officers say they thwarted. The Abraham Initiatives tally, summarized in Abraham Initiatives’ full year-end count of victims, arrives at its higher figure because it counts Arab-sector victims in a way police do not recognize.
The gap matters less than the direction. Police told the committee that common criminal offenses fell 8 percent in 2025 from 2024. Arab-sector homicides rose sharply in the same window. Investigators filed 63 indictments in murder cases during the year, a number Superintendent Abudraham acknowledged was low, given the toll.
The violence carried names as well as numbers. A toddler was stabbed to death by her father in East Jerusalem. A 16-year-old was shot en route to school in Acre. A pediatrician, Dr. Abdullah Awad, was killed at a clinic in Kafr Yasif in February 2025. Three of every four killings in the year happened in public view, the Eilaf report concluded, with no immediate police intervention. The pattern has driven residents in some Arab towns to keep their children indoors.
The Abram Initiatives, the Center for the Advancement of Security in Arab Society, has tracked Arab-sector homicides since 2017, when the curve began its sharp turn upward. Between 2018 and 2023, the per-capita Arab homicide rate grew by a factor of 2.8, a Taub Center study found, a trajectory that has continued, by the watchdog’s count, since 2023.
The Enforcement Gap
Israel Police has solved just 15% versus 65% homicide cases across the two communities, the watchdog Eilaf and Knesset data confirm in the 15% versus 65% homicide clearance gap. The watchdog’s separate tally shows police cleared only about 10 percent of Arab-sector killings in 2025. Historical clearance has been a single-digit share for years. Where the state solves two of three Jewish murders, it solves roughly one of seven Arab ones.
The trust data point in the same direction. The Israel Democracy Institute recorded in November 2025 that just 19 percent of Arab respondents said they trust police very much or quite a lot, down from 27 percent the year before. Jewish trust stood at 35 percent. Ta’al MK Ahmad Tibi, one of the most prominent Arab voices in the Knesset, charged on Channel 12 that National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir smiles each time an Arab is murdered. In February 2026, Police Commissioner Daniel Levi declared Arab-sector crime a state of national emergency and called on other government agencies to join the fight.
The gap mirrors what the Abraham Initiatives describes as selective enforcement of the law: politically sensitive cases move fast, organized-crime cases against Arab victims do not. Qasem Awad, whose 30-year-old son, the pediatrician Dr. Abdullah Awad, was shot dead while filling in for a colleague at a clinic in Kafr Yasif in February 2025, told the watchdog that police gave his family no update in ten months. If his son had been Jewish, Awad said, the killer would have been arrested within an hour.
Roughly 73 percent of Arab businesses in construction, agriculture, commerce, and industry say they have been required to pay protection money to organized-crime families, according to a survey by Hashomer Hachadash cited in a Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security analysis. The protection trade is estimated at around NIS 2 billion a year. Where the state’s enforcement arm is thin, families turn to crime bosses because their courts carry out sentences faster than the legal system.
What the State Has Already Built
A workable policy infrastructure already exists, drawn up under the Bennett-Lapid government in late 2021. Cabinet Resolution 549 set up a five-year plan, with around 27 billion shekels in funding, to fight crime and violence in the Arab sector through joint work by police, tax authorities, anti-money-laundering bodies, and prosecutors. Resolution 550, a sister plan, committed comparable resources to close socio-economic gaps in education, housing, employment, and infrastructure.
Operation Safe Track, the operational wing of those resolutions, launched on October 17, 2021, under Deputy Public Security Minister Yoav Segalovitz. The original budget set a NIS 30 billion, about $8 billion at the time, allocation over five years for the broader Arab-sector investment strategy that accompanied the enforcement operation. The operation itself runs on law-enforcement tools, with the larger socio-economic plan funding the supporting investments in towns. Police opened a new Saif Branch (sword in Arabic), staffed mostly by Arab-Israeli Muslim, Christian, and Druze researchers, several from families wounded by organized crime. As documented in Operation Safe Track’s first indictments and weapons seizures, the operation’s opening weeks produced 62 indictments, 51 defendants held until the end of legal proceedings, and raids across a single night in Operation Ocean that yielded 40 rifles, 13 pistols, two machine guns, and two explosives linked to a cellphone.
The Saif Branch’s head, Asst.-Ch. Jamal Hacrush, became the first Muslim Arab-Israeli to hold his rank, and his own Kafr Kanna home was the target of a drive-by shooting in September 2021. The framework made visible what serious, sustained enforcement looks like in practice: targets identified through analysis, then pursued by tax authorities, financial-crime units, and police moving in lockstep.
The 2022 result bore out the framework. Arab-sector homicides fell from the previous year after the operation took effect. Safe Track was extended beyond the originally planned six months, an unusual affirmation of an operation that was still considered preliminary.
How Politics Hollowed the Toolkit
Then the politics shifted. Itamar Ben Gvir took office as minister of national security at the start of 2023. Abraham Initiatives data show Arab-sector homicide cases more than doubled that year. Within months, Ben Gvir cut key funding for an anti-Arab-crime program called Stop the Bleeding that the previous government had launched. He dismissed the senior police official in charge of Arab-sector crime and replaced him with a lower-ranking officer. In December 2025, the Prime Minister’s Office announced plans to redirect $70 million from an Arab economic-development program into the police budget to address severe nationalistic crime, a move the Mosawa Center called a dangerous political step.
I don’t work for the Arabs, not just for the Arabs. I work for everyone. There is 20% less murder in the Jewish sector, let’s put that on the table… 60% fewer murders of Jewish women, and 20% fewer car thefts.
Itamar Ben Gvir, Israel’s national security minister, made the comment in a Kan Reshet Bet radio interview reported by CNN. The figures he cited, drawn from a year that coincided with a surge in Arab-sector killings, did not satisfy the Abraham Initiatives, the Knesset committee, or Israel Police’s own data tables. The full context is laid out in Ben Gvir’s claim of falling Jewish-sector murders.
The deeper cut was in funding. By the end of 2024, the five-year Arab-sector plan had used only 39 percent of its budget, but its utilization rate was the highest among comparable government resolutions, because road-laying and school-building take years. In 2024 the budget was then cut by 15 percent for the war effort, three times the across-the-board reduction. Minister of Social Equality May Golan, internal ministry letters obtained by Shomrim show, then proposed diverting a further 2.5 billion shekels from Resolution 550 into police and Shin Bet budgets. Directors-general across the government warned that the move would gut hundreds of education and welfare programs.
Police Commissioner Levi has now asked for Shin Bet involvement in the fight against Arab-sector organized crime, a step that diverts the agency from counterterrorism and treats citizen crime as a sovereign threat.
The Real Problem: Parallel Power
The killings grab headlines. The consequential damage is the steady replacement of state authority with organized-clan authority, the rise of parallel power structures that no longer defer to the courts. About 70 percent of witnesses refuse to cooperate with police in Arab-sector investigations, the Ayalef report found, citing doubts about the state’s ability to protect them. Roughly 73 percent of Arab businesses in construction, agriculture, commerce, and industry report being forced to pay protection money, with protection rackets estimated to pull in around NIS 2 billion a year. Families turn to crime bosses for dispute resolution because criminal courts carry out their sentences faster than the legal system.
The police are failing. Ten months after a murder in broad daylight, no arrests, no suspects, no communication with us. In security-related cases, they catch them within hours, so why don’t they here?
Qasem Awad, the father of Dr. Abdullah Awad of Mazra’a, gave the testimony to the Abraham Initiatives in December 2025. The pattern he described repeats across the sector: investigations opened, then frozen, until witnesses tire or move away.
That parallel authority has a clear geography. Lod, a mixed city of roughly 75,000 people, recorded 12 murders in 2025, the highest in its history. In June, a multi-victim shooting on a central street left two young men dead and five wounded, including a 12-year-old passerby. Ramla logged 15 murders in the year. Jaffa saw Jewish and Arab residents clash in early January 2026 after a rumored harassment attack that police later said was fabricated. Acre, with more than 15,000 Arab residents, recorded gunfire at schools, car bombings, and the August 2025 killing of a 16-year-old boy en route to school. The mixed-city murder figures and the regional smuggling picture are detailed in the mixed-city murder and drone-smuggling data.
In the Negev, the second-order risk turns regional. Crime families, mostly Bedouin, now use cheap drones to smuggle rifles, medium machine guns, and grenades from Egypt and Jordan. The Shin Bet exposed networks in 2025 in which Negev crime families supplied weapons to Hamas in exchange for money or protection. After a police operation in the village of Tarabin, local gangs launched retaliatory attacks on nearby Jewish communities.
Two of the country’s leading crime families, the Jarushi and the Hariri, with Abu Latif a close third, run the bulk of the trade. The trade pulls in an estimated NIS 2 billion a year from protection rackets, with smuggling routes running from the Sinai and Jordanian borders into the Bedouin villages of the Negev.
The Druze Counter-Example
One community inside the Arab sector has moved the opposite direction. The Druze, who make up a small share of Israel’s Arab population, have been drafted into the Israel Defense Forces since 1957 at the request of their own community leaders. They serve alongside Jewish citizens in combat units, in the Border Police, and in the Shin Bet. Academic studies across decades document what Israeli officials have long observed: ethnic-based violence by or against the Druze is rare, and Druze localities are not the towns where the homicide wave concentrates.
The correlation does not reduce to military service alone. Druze integration runs through schools, civil service, and local government, the kind of deep civic embedding that the rest of the Arab sector largely lacks. Roughly 3 percent of Arab Israelis, Druze aside, do national service today, according to the Jewish People Policy Institute.
The takeaway for policy is straightforward. Where Arab citizens have joined Israeli institutions in depth, the parallel power structures have not taken root. Where they have stayed outside, the clans have filled the gap.
Three Pillars of an Effective Response
A workable answer has to draw on both halves of the record. The state has tools when it uses them steadily, and Arab society has to take responsibility for the parts the state alone cannot reach. Three pillars follow from the data.
The first pillar is to disrupt criminal networks through civil tools, not just arrests.
| Pillar | What it does | What it requires |
|---|---|---|
| Disrupt criminal networks financially | Asset freezes, business bans, tax-evasion prosecutions that hit the economic base of family-based crime | Attorney General’s national task force meeting weekly; Shin Bet-grade intelligence applied to organized-crime targets without diverting counterterrorism focus |
| Mobilize Arab veterans in security roles | Paid liaison, intelligence, and neighborhood-policing posts for IDF and national-service alumni from high-violence towns | Civil-service commissions that hire, train, and promote Arab veterans into real operational authority, not symbolic roles |
| Performance agreements with Arab municipalities | Channel budget autonomy, infrastructure funding, and local-government powers to towns that reduce violence and share intelligence | A central-government takeover option where violence stays high and cooperation fails, triggered by audited scorecards |
Asset freezes, business bans, tax-evasion indictments, and coordinated court orders across whole family operations break organized crime more durably than scattered arrests. The 2010s takedowns of the Jewish Abergil and Domrani families succeeded because prosecutors went after corporate shells, properties, and senior leadership together. The same playbook has to apply to the Jarushi, Hariri, and Abu Latif networks, with economic infrastructure targeted at the source rather than at the foot soldiers.
The second pillar is to put Arab Israeli veterans inside the security architecture. Villages like Mazra’a and Umm al-Fahm already produce young men and women who speak the local language, know the family trees, and have already demonstrated loyalty through years of military service. They are not being used as investigators, gang analysts, or outreach officers in numbers anywhere near what the Saif Branch showed was possible. A national program, with real pay and real authority, would close the capability gap that police complain about and would weaken the alienation narrative driving non-cooperation with investigators.
The third pillar is performance-linked budgets for Arab local government. Towns that reduce homicides, share intelligence proactively, and let the state operate should get faster infrastructure money and more discretion over education and policing. Towns where violence stays high and cooperation fails should see the central government take direct charge of security, with audited, public scorecards replacing vague promises. The five-year plans of 2021 already gathered the technical pieces. What they lacked was the political will to enforce them consistently and the local buy-in to make them work.
Both Sides Owe an Answer
The state owes every Israeli citizen, Arab or Jewish, equal protection. The evidence of 2025 is that it has not delivered. The clearance gap, the funding cuts, and the political use of the police all confirm a pattern of neglect that the Abraham Initiatives, the Knesset, and the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security independently describe.
Israel’s Arab citizens owe a parallel answer, which is the rejection of the parallel rules that let daily murder continue. Clan loyalty that overrides civic duty, tolerance of illegal firearms, and silence enforced by family pressure are choices made inside Arab society, and only Arab society can reverse them. The Druze experience shows that civic embedding works.
The 2022 homicide dip shows that steady enforcement plus local buy-in reduces killings. The collapse since 2023 shows what happens when either side withdraws. Until the tools the state already built are used in full, and until Arab society makes the same commitment, the killing will continue.
