Unsolved Killings in Arab Towns Produced Israel’s Deadliest Year

Arab society in Israel lost 252 people to crime in 2025, the highest yearly toll the Abraham Initiatives has recorded. Police closed about 10 percent of those files, and the rest did not stay quiet.

The coexistence group, which now tracks these killings from open sources, closed its year on December 28 with 218 separate incidents, 22 more dead than the 230 it counted in 2024. Police Commissioner Danny Levy had just told the country there was a “continuous decrease in crime statistics.” The bodies said otherwise, and the unsolved files are what turned a bad year into a machine.

Arab Society Lost 252 People to Crime in 2025

The monitor’s 252 Arab citizens were killed in those 218 incidents, a count that already outran every year since it began publishing the series. 88 percent of the victims were shot, a share the group ties to guns that still move across Israel’s borders faster than they are taken off the street. More than half of the dead were men between 18 and 30.

The map is not a mystery. Most of the country’s Arab citizens live in the north, and 141 of the dead were killed there, including Haifa. The center, including Tel Aviv, accounted for 72. The south accounted for 35. Three Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, who fall under the Israel Police even without citizenship, also died, and one Arab citizen was killed in Qalqilya, where he had been living.

THE YEARLY TOLL IN ARAB SOCIETY

The jump that still shapes the present is 2023, when the count more than doubled from 116 the year before and then never came back down. Lod and Nazareth led the country for the third straight year. Rahat, in the south, buried 11 people in 2025 alone.

Arab citizens make up about a quarter of Israel’s population and accounted for over 80 percent of the country’s violent killings in 2025. A parallel briefing by Baladna, an Arab youth group, put that rate beside Jamaica, Ecuador, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Costa Rica and Puerto Rico. The comparison is ugly because the guns are local and the files stay open.

Police Closed About One in Ten of Those Files

By June 2025 the Abraham Initiatives put the share of Arab-community murders police had solved at 10 percent, and it held that figure for the year. In 2024 the same monitor had 14.8 percent. In 2023 it had 10.5 percent. For killings of Jewish Israelis the comparable share is about 65 percent.

An indictment count that circulated with the 2025 file list makes the gap plainer, and it is a different number. Thirty-two indictments were filed in connection with the 252 deaths. Twelve of those files concerned people killed by police fire, which left 20 ordinary criminal cases that reached a charge sheet. Suspects were often arrested and then released for want of evidence.

Police say intimidation is the brake: people who talk become the next target, and crime families now run whole streets. That is true as far as it goes. It does not explain why a daylight shooting at a health clinic can sit for ten months with no named suspect, or why the same state that closes a terror file in hours cannot close a murder in Kafr Yasif.

Qassem Awad, a former local council head in Mazra’a, put the contrast in one sentence after his son was killed filling in at that clinic. He did not ask for a name. He asked to be told the case was moving.

The police are failing. Ten months after a murder in full daylight, no arrests, no suspects, no communication with us. This is the extent to which they disrespect the blood of an Arab citizen. In security cases they catch suspects within hours. So why not here?

Qassem Awad, father of Dr. Abdallah Awad, to the Abraham Initiatives

When a file dies, the debt does not. Relatives keep a ledger the state will not, and the next shooting is often the collection.

A Protection Payment Did Not Save Suzanne Abd al-Qader

Suzanne Abd al-Qader was a mother of three and a volunteer with Women Wage Peace. She was not in the crime business. After her son was pulled into a street fight in Tira, the people on the other side came to her.

THE PRIVATE COLLECTION LOOP

• The warning: Someone set fire to Suzanne’s car in front of her house after a sulha, a negotiated truce, had supposedly ended the fight.
• The price: She was told to pay 300,000 shekels or her son would be hurt, then bargained the demand down to 70,000 and handed the money over through her husband.
• The offer from the state: Police knew she was under threat and suggested a shelter for battered women, a room that would have marked her without touching the men who were squeezing her.
• The ending: A few days after she paid, she was hit with nine bullets in front of her home on April 4, 2025. The killer was still free when the year-end report went to print.

Her sister Sawsan had told her not to pay. “If you pay, you pay the price of your murder,” she said. Suzanne answered that this was her son and she was not going to take any chances. The payment bought a few quiet days, then an ambulance on her street.

That is the second killing inside the first one. A mother is squeezed because the original file never became a case, and the people who burn a car learn that the state will offer the woman a shelter instead of an arrest. Thirty-one of the 2025 dead were cousins, siblings, spouses, or a father and son killed in the same run of violence, a pattern the monitor said grew worse through the year.

The Pediatrician Was Killed on a Cover Shift

Dr. Abdallah Awad was 30, a pediatrician from Mazra’a, three months into a new house the family had built for him. On February 3, 2025, he was covering for another doctor at a Clalit clinic in Kafr Yasif when gunmen shot him. Police called it mistaken identity. He was the sixth Arab citizen killed since the previous night.

Health Minister Uriel Buso said it was unthinkable that a clinic should become a place where staff fear for their lives. Prof. Zion Hagay, chair of the Israel Medical Association, said six citizens had died in a single stretch and that the state had to “put an end to the negligence that has characterized this recent period.”

Awad’s wife, Samah, a nurse, could not stay in the empty house. She left her job at Ziv Hospital and took their two children back to her parents in Kaukab Abu al-Hija. Their daughter Alma, four, asked her grandmother whether a ladder to the sky would let her visit her dad.

Qassem later told the monitor he had wanted revenge in the first nights, then took the question to a sheikh and to the Mufti in Mecca. He was told his son was a martyr, that revenge is a sin, and that it hits the innocent. “Once you open that door, there is no end to it,” he said. He has grandchildren. Many other fathers do not get that counsel, or do not take it, and the 31 kin deaths are what the other path looks like on a ledger.

Twelve Arab citizens were also killed during police operations in 2025, against one in 2024 and seven in 2023. The monitor asked for a full accounting of those shootings. That is a separate pile of files, and it still sits inside the same trust collapse.

Mayors, Mothers and the Same Blast Radius

A record 23 Arab women were killed in 2025, some in domestic attacks, others by crime groups and revenge cycles. Children were in the rooms and in the shops. On November 23, Sabah Abu al-Qian was in a supermarket in Jatt with her 7-year-old sister when a round hit her in the shoulder. She reached her father by phone from the ambulance and died on the way to hospital, her cousin Anas said.

In some towns, parents now keep children indoors for the walk to school. Three of four killings in a separate Eilaf briefing happened in public view with no immediate police intervention. The people who can still leave, leave. The people who cannot, pay, hide, or arm up.

The vacuum has also reached the officials who are supposed to stand in for the state. Since 2019 the Abraham Initiatives has counted 17 assassination attempts on Arab elected officials, including 4 murders and 9 cases that wounded the official or people around them. Eleven council or city heads were hit, one of them killed. Only 5 indictments were filed. In the first months of 2026 the group already counted 4 cases, a pace it said would make the year the worst on that list.

מאז 2019 אירעו 17 נסיונות התנקשות בנבחרי ציבור ערבים.

– מתוך 17, היו 4 מקרי רצח ו-9 מקרים שהסתיימו בפציעה של נבחר הציבור או סביבתו.
– 11 ראשי מועצה או ראשי ערים נפגעו, מתוכם אחד נרצח.
– 2026 צפויה להיות שנת השיא עם 4 מקרים תוך פחות מחצי שנה.
– הוגשו רק 5 כתבי אישום. pic.twitter.com/vh432qxhBy

— יוזמות אברהם Abraham Initiatives (@Abraham_Ints) May 20, 2026

A mayor who cannot walk his own street without a gunman in the file is not a local scandal. He is the last civilian office the clans have to capture, and the indictment count says they are not being stopped.

A 19 Percent Trust Figure in Arab Towns

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has held the police portfolio through the years when the count doubled and then set a record. MK Ahmad Tibi, chair of Ta’al, said on Channel 12 that Ben-Gvir “smiles each time an Arab is murdered.” Police reject the charge of neglect and say officers are doing what they can against syndicates that punish anyone who talks.

The Israel Democracy Institute’s November 2025 poll is the number that sits under that argument. Only 19 percent of Arab respondents said they trust police very much or quite a lot, down from 27 percent a year earlier. Among Jewish Israelis the figure was 35 percent. A November survey for the Abraham Initiatives by the Statnet Institute found 64 percent of Arab respondents naming the fight against crime and violence as Arab society’s most pressing issue, and 25 percent naming it as the top factor in their vote.

The group’s own January 2026 demands list is colder. It says that since the start of 2021, 990 Arab citizens have been killed by violence and crime, including 750 since the current government took office. That is the span in which the yearly count went from the old 100s to 244, 230 and then 252. Community leaders use those years to knock down the claim that the blood is a cultural constant. A constant does not double after a change of minister and then set a record.

The same gap has already been laid out as clan violence that corrodes Israel’s rule of law, with families stepping in as courts when the state’s files go cold. Levy’s decrease line and Tibi’s smile line are the public fight. The 10 percent solve rate is the mechanism underneath both.

Why Did 2026 Start Faster Than 2025?

The 2025 record did not cap the run. It advertised that a killing in an Arab town is still a cheap crime.

FROM THE RECORD YEAR INTO 2026

1. December 28, 2025: The Abraham Initiatives closes the year at 252 dead in 218 incidents, against 230 in 2024.
2. June 2026: The same monitor counts 144 homicide deaths in the first half, 140 of them Arab citizens and 4 Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, against 128 in the first half of 2025, and puts the solve rate at 12 percent.
3. July 12, 2026: After the killing of Ibrahim al-Zayuti in Jaffa, the year-to-date count is 155, 16 percent above the 134 recorded to the same date in 2025.
4. August 11, 2026: Levy speaks of a “drastic drop” in the monthly murder rate. The monitor’s running count is 160, still 2.5 percent above the 156 recorded to the same point in 2025, even after a quieter stretch from mid-July.
5. September 10, 2026: Raed Haj Yahya, 50, is shot in Taibe and becomes the 173rd Arab homicide victim of 2026 on the monitor’s list.

A slower late summer is not a closed file. The first half of 2026 was already the worst first half the group had counted, and the solve rate moved only from 10 percent to 12 percent. Each open 2025 case is still a debt someone may try to collect in 2026, which is how a record year manufactures the next one.

At the Awad house in Mazra’a a small fountain stands by the door, a memorial to a doctor killed on a shift that was not even his. Samia, his mother, will be photographed only next to her son. Qassem says he has nothing left to fear, because the dearest thing is already gone, and the man who shot him has not been named.

Frequently Asked Questions

How Does the Abraham Initiatives Count These Killings?

It is a civil-society monitor, not the police, and it builds the list from open sources, then publishes a year-end summary. The 2025 report closed on December 28 with 218 incidents and was dedicated to four named victims, including Dr. Abdallah Awad and Suzanne Abd al-Qader, whose killers had not been caught at the time of printing. East Jerusalem residents who die in criminal violence are included because they fall under the Israel Police even without citizenship.

What Share of the 2025 Dead Were Young Adults?

More than 72 percent of those murdered were between 18 and 40, and more than half were 18 to 30, according to the same report. That is a working-age slice of Arab society, not a narrow gang core, and it is the bracket that also shows up in the family-cluster deaths where a father and son were killed together.

Where Does This Homicide Rate Sit Globally?

A Baladna briefing released alongside the 2025 count ranked Arab citizens of Israel eighth in homicides globally, behind Jamaica, Ecuador, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Costa Rica and Puerto Rico. The ranking treats Arab society as if it were a country, which is a statistical device, but it is the device community groups now use to describe a rate the rest of Israel does not live with.

What Were the Police Clearance Rates in 2023 and 2024?

The Abraham Initiatives put the share of Arab-community murders solved at 10.5 percent for 2023 and 14.8 percent for 2024, before the 2025 figure fell back to 10 percent. Those two earlier years are the baseline that makes 2025 look like a return to the floor, not a one-off bad season.

What Do Arab Citizens Name as Their Top Issue?

In a November 2025 Statnet Institute poll commissioned by the Abraham Initiatives, 64 percent named eliminating crime and violence as Arab society’s most pressing issue, and 89 percent supported a joint list of the four Arab political parties. Thirty percent named lack of impact as the top barrier to voting, which is the political face of the same unsolved files.