Three people were shot dead in a Bedouin village in northern Israel on Thursday morning, pushing the number of Palestinian-Israelis killed by violent crime this year to 33.
The victims were all men, with one aged 25, another 36 and the third in his 60s, Israel’s main ambulance service said. The killings were the second triple murder in less than a week.
The high death toll is raising questions about the commitment of the ultranationalist government and police to tackling violent crime, which disproportionately affects Israel’s Arab population.
The far-right minister in charge of Israel’s police, Itamar Ben-Gvir, was revealed to have only used half of the funds given to fight crime in the community in the 2022-2026 budget, a report in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz revealed in December. Mr Ben-Gvir is known for his anti-Arab views and has eight criminal convictions, including for incitement to racism.
The murder rate in the Arab community has doubled since Mr Ben-Gvir took office in late 2022, with the number of people killed in violent crimes reaching a record 252 last year. The Israeli president Isaac Herzog called violence in the Israeli-Palestinian community a “national emergency” after Thursday's killings.
“It’s time to wake up. The blood spilt on the streets of Arab society is the blood of the country’s citizens, and the rampant crime is a clear and immediate danger to the security of all of Israeli society,” he said, in comments reported in Israeli media.
On Saturday, Arab leaders staged a large demonstration in Tel Aviv against the crime wave and accused the government of allowing the problem to go unchecked. Organisers estimated that tens of thousands of people attended, including Jews – a rare moment of solidarity in Israel’s bitterly divided society.
A week earlier, Arab communities throughout the country launched a strike against the crime wave, after business owners in the city of Sakhnin protested over being targeted by extortionists.
