Israel’s Arab community under a state-ordered siege: How killings, crime, and drugs run wild

According to the Abraham Initiatives report, around 230 Arab citizens in Israel lost their lives to crime and violence in 2024. The year before, 2023, was the bloodiest on record, with 244 people killed within the Arab community due to violent crimes. The trend continues with 134 victims of fatal crimes reported in just the first six months of this year. Behind each number lies a shattered family and a community in fear — and a deepening sense that such violence persists amid systematic neglect, if not quiet complicity, by the authorities of the State of Israel. “Those are not just allegations here, this is the reality on the ground. We know how widespread the crime and arms are in the community. If the police force wanted to end this, they would have ended it,” said Afu Agbaria, the Arab Israeli politician, former member of the Israeli Knesset from Hadash Party.

It’s important to note that this discussion does not include violence related to the West Bank or the direct Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. These numbers reflect domestic violence within the tiny Arab minority living inside Israel.

The Abraham Initiatives is a non-profit organisation founded in 1989 that works to advance equality and a shared society between Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel. It publishes regular reports on issues such as crime, violence, education, and civic inclusion in Arab communities in Israel. Their data is widely cited by policymakers, researchers, and civil society groups in Israel and abroad when it comes to the status of the Arab community in Israel.

Interestingly, data from the Israeli Taub Center for Social Policy Studies shows that in 2023, over 240 killings occurred within the Arab community, while 66 homicides were recorded among the Jewish community. In 2024, the number of killings in the Jewish community dropped to 58—even though the population of the Jews in Israel is roughly five times larger than the Arabs, which suffered 230 violent deaths that same year. The gap is glaring; violence, combined with poverty, isolation, and neglect, has hit Arab towns hardest, leaving them to carry a burden far heavier than their numbers.

I also spoke to the former minister, former member of Knesset, and retired senior commander of the Israeli army, Efraim Sneh, about the situation in the Arab society. “It is not a systematic policy of the state of Israel to let violence spread among the Arabs here, it is obvious negligence from the far-right government of Benjamin Netanyahu,” said Efraim Sneh. “The current internal security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, is an extremist, racist; he doesn’t care about the security or living conditions in the Arab community,” retired Israeli Brigadier General and former minister Efraim Sneh told me over a phone conversation.

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Reports and experts have pointed to the proliferation of crime organisations within the Arab community in Israel, specialising in arms trafficking, drug smuggling, and extortion. These networks are widely active across towns, villages, and regions with significant Arab populations. Yet local police efforts to dismantle them remain minimal, fuelling a growing perception that police performance in Arab towns lags behind that in Jewish towns. Many crimes are left unsolved. For many, this disparity signals that the state treats Arab security as a low priority—if not deliberately allowing insecurity to stifle the community’s political growth and pursuit of equality. “Over the past two decades, following the Al-Aqsa Intifada, crime has been spreading more widely, killings, drugs and violence, diverting the attention of Arab citizens from pressing political issues and their future, and keeping everyone caught up in internal conflicts and criminal activities,” said Afu Agbaria, the former Arab member of Knesset from Hadash Party.

In the Arab community in Israel, armed violence and drug gang activity are deeply intertwined. The operations of drug syndicates remain largely in the shadows, with little clarity on how these networks function under such volatile conditions. While Israeli authorities have made it difficult for cartels to cultivate or manufacture drugs within the country—for clear legal and security reasons—alternative routes and methods have nonetheless taken root. The business has expanded noticeably in the occupied West Bank, which is a few hundred meters away on the other side of the Green Line, especially in Area C, which covers about 60 per cent of the West Bank and includes most rural and strategic land bordering Israel, where Palestinian police presence is limited. Under the Oslo Accords, Palestinian forces are barred from operating in these zones without prior Israeli approval, which is rarely obtained. This creates enforcement gaps. These gaps have allowed the business of drug cultivation and production to take hold, flourish quietly, and then be traded and consumed widely within the Arab community across the Green Line.

To demonstrate the weak police performance in Israel against crime in the Arab-majority towns, Efraim Sneh said, “During the government of Yair Lapid just a few years ago, internal security minister Omer Bar-Lev did a great job cracking down on crime families and violence in the Arab community. It’s not a state policy, just a far-right government negligence.”

Spreading violence, crime, and killings in the Arab community are seen by many locals here as a pretext for a broader transfer agenda—branding the Arab population as criminal and incapable of coexistence, in order to rid the State of Israel of them. “When Benjamin Netanyahu mentions he is fighting on seven different fronts, what does he mean? I believe the Arab community inside Israel is one of these fronts,” Afu Agbaria said. “After Gaza, the West Bank comes, the transfer plans, and next is the Arab citizens inside Israel,” he added.

This could be a calculated step toward stabilising the Jewish character of the state, potentially reframing the displacement of indigenous people as refugees joining a long, unending queue of forcefully exiled Palestinians from their homeland. The current wave of violence in the Arab community is just one part of a bigger picture—a trend that has been repeating itself at the hands of the occupation ever since 1948, with brutal consistency and different strategies.

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