Killings of Palestinians in Israel reach 254 as most go unsolved

Recorded killings in Palestinian communities inside Israel reached 254 last year, against about 230 in 2024, 89 in 2019 and 58 in 2015. Palestinian citizens make up roughly a fifth of Israel's population, and more than four of every five people murdered in the country last year came from that fifth.

The second gap is what happens afterwards. Of the killings recorded in Palestinian communities in 2024, police cleared somewhere between 15 and 18 percent; in Jewish Israeli society the rate was above half. A study published in 2023, which set both communities against member states of the OECD, put the homicide rate among Palestinian citizens at about 11 per 100,000 people and the rate among Jewish Israelis at about 0.64. Until roughly 2015 the ratio between the two stood near four to one; by 2023 there were about 13 killings in Palestinian communities for every one in Jewish society.

That the state can act against organised crime is not in question, because it has. In December 2003 a bomb aimed at the crime boss Zeev Rosenstein went off in the middle of Tel Aviv, the seventh attempt on his life; he survived it and three passers-by were killed. The government then treated organised crime as a threat to the country's social and economic resilience rather than as a matter for ordinary policing. Cabinet resolution 4618 set up a joint effort by the state attorney's office, the police, the tax authority and the body that polices money laundering and terror financing, aimed at the finances that kept the organisations running rather than at the people they sent onto the street. A companion decision, 4619, prepared the ground for a witness protection authority.

Of the six major organisations of that period, four were broken up or left badly weakened, among them Rosenstein's and the Abergil group, which the FBI had described as a substantial international syndicate. Two others survived in much reduced form.

Those organisations were overwhelmingly Jewish, and their collapse left a space. Large-scale organised crime had until then been comparatively unusual in Arab towns and villages, concentrated instead in the mixed cities of Jaffa, Ramla, Lod and Acre, where many of the Palestinians who stayed after the Nakba live in the poorer districts. What the groups found as they moved in was thin policing, weak institutions, easy access to illegal weapons, economies that had been left behind and municipalities with little capacity to resist.

Their business is drugs, protection payments, lending at punitive rates, extortion and weapons smuggling. Increasingly it is also public money. Criminal groups have pushed into local government, seeking sway over municipal elections, leaning on tender committees and threatening elected officials, with waste collection, recycling, construction, transport and school budgets the contracts worth having. Where that succeeds, the group is no longer only operating around public institutions but partly inside them: deciding which firms may work, which contractors are paid, and who can stand for office in safety.

Nazareth spent much of last year in a crisis over refuse collection and municipal finances, with criminal organisations suspected of working their way into the city's contracting; the investigation ran into the arrest of Ali Salam, the mayor at the time. In Arraba the mayor is reported to have found that a town of its size was paying wildly inflated prices for services such as waste collection, and to have asked the state repeatedly for help. His house was later shot at and he received threats. The state asks Arab municipalities to hold the line against these groups, and the officials who try it can find themselves doing so without protection.

One organisation shows how far the reach can extend. The Abu Latif group came out of Rameh, a Druze town where military and security service are common, and members of the extended family have served in Israeli security bodies. Members were also arrested in 2001 and charged in a security case: dealings with an agent of a foreign power, and help given to Hezbollah in bringing arms, bombs and narcotics in over the Lebanese border. Investigators have since alleged that the group used threats and extortion to gain a hold over defence ministry and military construction tenders, including work on installations along that same border and on air force facilities. Testimony attributed to its members has victims being told: "We are the state."

A separate thread runs back to the occupied territories. Israeli security agencies have relied for decades on Palestinian informants in the West Bank and Gaza, and when an informant is exposed, staying at home can become impossible; some have been moved with their families into Israel, at times under new names, into Palestinian towns and mixed cities. Their standing there can remain insecure, without settled citizenship, steady work or support. In 2021 a senior police officer claimed that enforcement was at times complicated because people involved in serious crime were also connected to the security services, and that the protection this brought them limited what the police could investigate. If that is so, two arms of the same state are working against each other; for a family in a town where people are being shot, the effect is simply that certain men are out of reach.

Complaints of neglect, discrimination and low clearance rates long predate Itamar Ben-Gvir's arrival as national security minister. Under him they have taken on a party-political edge, with the police command reshaped, officers seen as sympathetic promoted, and enforcement priorities set closer to his own politics. The killings have gone on rising through it.

The response inside Palestinian society has been the largest civic mobilisation there in years. It began in January when a bakery owner in Sakhnin, in the north, was pressed for protection money and refused to keep paying, announcing instead that he would shut the business and let his workers go. Traders, residents and local leaders took it up, and on 22 January tens of thousands filled the streets of Sakhnin while the city's shops closed in a general strike; a further demonstration in Tel Aviv drew tens of thousands more. Crime had become a collective political demand rather than a local misfortune. The organisations kept working and the killing did not fall away.

The government's newest answer is to bring the Shin Bet, the internal security service, into the fight directly. Palestinian politicians, civil society organisations, lawyers and former security officials have objected, and the objection is not that the criminal groups should be spared. It is what follows when a service built for national security threats is turned on the policing of a civilian minority, at a moment when the service is led by David Zini, whose appointment was contested over his politics and his closeness to the prime minister. A population asking for ordinary police protection is being handed something else.

Underneath all of it is an economy. Poverty, thin infrastructure, a housing shortage and long underinvestment in schooling and local government persist alongside a small and growing Palestinian middle class in the professions, technology and business, which has widened the distance inside Palestinian society itself. The state comptroller reported in 2023 that among Arab citizens aged between 18 and 24, some 34 percent of the women, and 25 percent of the men, were neither in work nor in education or vocational training — far above the equivalent rates in Jewish society. Organised crime pays where the formal economy does not, lends where banks will not, and offers standing where institutions are absent.

What the figures describe, then, is not two crime problems but two levels of protection. The apparatus that took apart the finances of the country's largest criminal organisations two decades ago has not been turned with the same force on the ones that replaced them, and the citizens paying for that are counted every year in the same column.