Arab Crime Is Spiking As Officials Cite Neglect
TAIBEH, Israel — After a day of work in construction, Alaa Sarsour, 25, showered, dressed and walked the short distance to his friend’s pre-wedding henna party in the old heart of Taibeh, an Arab town in central Israel.
Suddenly, midcelebration, a wild burst of bullets split the cool night air, hitting Mr. Sarsour and five other guests. Mr. Sarsour died in his brother’s lap, relatives said, apparently the victim of a feud between the gunman — a friend of the groom who had been at the party earlier — and a member of Mr. Sarsour’s family.
The shooting was one of at least 16 homicides in Israel’s Arab communities last month, and one of nearly 100 so far this year.
The killings — not by Israeli soldiers but by Arab criminals — account for about 70 percent of all Israeli homicides, though Arabs represent just over 20 percent of the population. The surging violence has shocked
the country and put a spotlight on what the government acknowledges to have been decades of neglect of crime in Arab communities.
Omer Bar-Lev, who as Israel’s minister of public security oversees the country’s police force, decried what he said was “the prevailing assumption that as long as they are killing each other, that’s their problem.”
The number of homicides within the Arab community has spiraled in recent years, to at least 98 so far this year, from 58 in 2013, the police say.
Fewer than a quarter of the cases have been solved, a symptom, critics say, of police indifference and Arab distrust of the police. Of over 3,300 shootings among Arabs in 2019, only 5 percent resulted in indictments.
Arab leaders, experts and government officials attribute the spike in internecine violence mostly to the rise of well-armed Arab crime organizations. But personal grudges add to the numbers, sometimes escalating into deadly clan vendettas.
Estimates of illegal guns in Arab communities range from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands, though the Arab population of Israel numbers under two million. “Nobody really knows how to quantify it,” says Tomer Lotan, the director-general of the Ministry of Public Security.
One night in February, masked gunmen fired at a house, telling the owner they would be back two days later to collect money, town’s mayor, Dr. Suheil Diab said. When they returned, one of them armed with an M16 assault rifle, a police SWAT team was waiting in ambush.
Bullets started flying. Across the street, Ahmad Hijazi, a nursing student, ran out when he heard cries for help and was shot dead. Muhammad Armoush, a doctor, followed him out, and was shot in the foot. One of the gunmen was killed, another was severely wounded. A third escaped.
Dr. Armoush said he saw the police aiming for Mr. Hijazi and himself. Police investigators have not yet determined if it was their bullets, or those of the criminals, that hit Dr. Armoush and Mr. Hijazi.