The number of Palestinians killed by weapons stolen from the army is increasing
Armed violence claims the lives of the "48 Arabs"... and the Israeli police do not care
Demonstration against gun violence in Ramle.
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Aisha Hujairat holds a picture of her son, Ammar.
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The Israeli police rarely intervene in the killings of Arabs.
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A Palestinian family in the quiet village of Bir al-Maksour, west of Nazareth, was exposed to a tragic accident, during which the three-year-old child (Ammar), was killed by a stray bullet while he was playing in front of the house.
It happened, during a car chase, as the grieving family is trying to understand how their son's life ended.
The police don't care what happens to the Palestinians, so the gangs know they can kill children while they play, and nothing will happen.
"We are very angry," said the deceased child's relative, sitting with his mother, Aisha Hujairat.
shock
The mother, still in shock, put her hands on her lap, her eyes red from crying.
(Ammar) was the first victim, in 2022, to the epidemic of armed violence that swept the Arab community in Israel.
Last year, 127 people lost their lives, with numbers rising year by year, since 2013. Meanwhile, illegal firearms proliferated on the streets.
Some estimates put the number into the hundreds of thousands of pieces, which were mainly stolen from Israeli military warehouses.
And gang violence means that people in the two million Arab minority, or “48 Arabs,” are far more likely to be killed by their fellow Arabs than Palestinians in the West Bank are at the hands of Israeli security forces.
The prevailing assumption in the police, until now, in the words of a high-ranking Israeli official, has been, "As long as they kill each other, this is their problem."
About 20% of Israel's population of nine million identify as Arab, including Bedouins and Druze, as well as Palestinian Muslims and Christians.
In theory, they are granted the same civil and political rights as Jewish citizens;
In practice, however, these societies face severe institutional discrimination.
In Arab and mixed neighborhoods across the country, the armed violence crisis is a bleak example of the issues facing minorities living in the Jewish state.
Organized crime networks are deeply rooted in Arab society, and their members turn to gang leaders for loans when Israeli banks refuse their applications.
Corruption and extortion in local politics are pervasive, as are illegal activities.
Marginalized Communities
There is no trust between society and the police, which leads Palestinian citizens of Israel to resort to traditional methods of conflict resolution such as sulh, a mechanism for resolving conflict between rival clans or families.
But with Arab youth exposed to the unemployment crisis due to the "pandemic", the streets are now filled with heavily armed people, ready to carry out operations for the benefit of their bosses, or to take revenge on someone else for the right price.
The result is the rupture of the social fabric that supports these marginalized communities.
Over the past month, the Guardian has interviewed more than 10 people in the central city of Lod, and other Arab towns, in Israel, where families have lost innocent loved ones to shootings.
In Ramle, Sharifa, the wife of Muhammad Abu Muammar, a beloved local teacher, was killed in crossfire in August 2020, while she was standing in the family home's kitchen on the second floor.
She was found after her two-year-old son tried to wake her up.
"I can't work, I'm struggling with the kids, and I can't even go home now," says her husband. "It's very painful." The other killings are calculated atrocities.
In May last year, an 18-year-old student, Anas, an ambulance volunteer, was shot.
Disagreements escalate, sometimes, thanks to the proliferation of weapons.
In Qalansuwa, the two neighbors, Abeer Al-Khatib and Zahia Nasra, and their two teenage sons, who were close friends, were lost after members of a rival clan opened fire on a group of young men, at the weekend of last March.
The dispute had originally started, months ago, due to a dispute over the parking of the car.
And killings of women by their husbands and other male family members are on the rise.
It is worth noting that the Arab community in Israel was strongly affected, in 1948, after the war that ended with the establishment of the Jewish state;
People have been displaced and pushed into poverty, according to Lod local council member Fida Shehadeh, one of several Arab women across Israel who are helping to form a new political lobby, for families of the victims, that is heard in Israel, called Mothers for Life. .
Unequal investigations
Shehadeh added, "What is happening now is the result of discrimination in schools, jobs and opportunities that should be available to all people," continuing, "about 10 years ago, the police launched a crackdown on the Jewish mafia, and put gang leaders in prison.
And while Israel has the best security infrastructure in the world, can’t the police arrest some of the Arab teenagers armed with guns in this country?”
Only about a quarter of murder cases in the Arab community were resolved during the past year, compared to the solution of about 70% of murders of Jewish citizens;
A discrepancy, the Israeli police said, reflects that investigations into the murders are "fraught with challenges", including "a lack of cooperation on the part of (Palestinian) citizens."
However, all the families interviewed by the Guardian said that their offers to assist in the investigations, or attempts to obtain information about progress in resolving their cases, had been ignored.
And (Abu Muammar), who agreed to testify about the murder of his wife, faced death threats from the gang, but the Israeli police did nothing, except to set up a roadblock at one end of the street in which he lives.
The new Israeli coalition government, which includes an Arab party for the first time, has made fighting crime in the Arab community a central promise to voters, as it allocated 230 million pounds sterling for more police stations in Arab towns, and a dedicated security unit for that.
But Israeli Public Security Minister Omar Bar-Lev acknowledged that it would take time for “people to be really convinced that there is a change,” explaining, “In the past six months, there has been a 30% increase in the number of people who have been arrested and brought to trial.” We dealt with the issue before with the intensity that we do today.”
For victims organizing and supporting one another, through Mothers for Life, change cannot come quickly.
In Bir al-Maksour, the birthplace of the child Ammar Hujairat, the family home was filled with neighbours, relatives and strangers from all over the world, who offered their condolences.
"The solidarity of all these people, Muslims, Christians and Jews, is the only thing that makes me strong at the moment," said (Aisha), the mother of the murdered child. Anger is one thing, and the killing must stop.”
• About 20% of Israel's population of nine million identify as Arab, including Bedouins and Druze, as well as Palestinian Muslims and Christians.
• In theory, Palestinian Arabs are granted the same civil and political rights as Jewish citizens; In practice, however, these societies face severe institutional discrimination. In Arab and mixed neighborhoods across the country, the armed violence crisis is a bleak example of the issues facing minorities living in the Jewish state.
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