People are being gunned down in the streets of neighbourhoods populated by Israel’s Arab community, part of a rising crime wave that many people say the Israeli police are doing nothing to stop.
Over the past 20 years, the crime rates have been growing in communities home to Israeli Arabs. Racketeering, murders linked to loansharking and score-settling have all become more common, according to a study carried out by Baladna in 2022. In 2021, the Abraham Initiatives, an NGO that documents violence within the Arab community, recorded a record 126 murders. The next year, in 2022, an association of Palestinian journalists recorded a total of 75 people killed, including nine women.
