On April 29, Susan Abdelqader was gunned down in her car near her home in Tira — the fifth Palestinian citizen of Israel killed in five days, and the 83rd this year. A well-known community activist, Abdelqader had helped lead Tel Aviv’s “March of the Dead” in 2023, where thousands of Palestinian and Jewish protesters carried symbolic coffins to decry the escalating murders in Israel’s Arab community. Just two years later, the 40-year-old mother of three became part of the very death toll she had protested. In the month since her murder, seven more Palestinian citizens have been killed.  

The killer, who remains at large, wasn’t trying to intimidate or threaten Abdelqader. Every bullet was aimed at the upper half of her body — he clearly intended to kill. “The gunman ambushed her, approached her car, and fired as she came home,” her husband, Ziad Bishara, told +972.

Abdelqader’s murder comes as organized criminal violence in Palestinian communities inside of Israel has reached unprecedented levels in recent years. According to the Abraham Initiatives, 230 Palestinian citizens were victims of homicide in 2024, up from 116 in 2022, and just below the 2023 peak of 244.

“We have an operation of well-armed criminal organizations that resemble small armies,” Political activist Ameer Makhoul told +972. “We’re talking about hundreds, even thousands of young people, either from inside the Green Line or from the West Bank, acting in a highly organized fashion.” 

Gangs have benefited from the proliferation of weapons inside Israel since the October 7 attacks — smuggling military explosives to carry out car bombings in Arab towns, and taking advantage of the government’s expansion of gun ownership — all while the Israel police turn a blind eye to their activity.

“No Palestinian community in Israel remains untouched by this violence,” Makhoul explained. “Crime has reached every corner of society. It is an entire economic system generating billions through extortion rackets, municipal contract takeovers, business seizures, and more. This is a whole mechanism, not just isolated incidents.”

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According to Makhoul, the problem has led to a notable rise in recent years in the number of Palestinian citizens seeking to emigrate from Israel. A quick scroll through Facebook groups about relocation reveals hundreds of inquiries from Palestinian citizens exploring immigration options. This, he emphasized, is no accident. 

While Palestinian citizens in Israel are deeply divided on many issues, from political allegiances and the question of Palestinian-Jewish partnership to cooperation with Zionist parties, on the epidemic of organized crime tearing through their communities there is near-unanimous agreement: this is not the result of institutional failure or neglect, but rather part of a deliberate state campaign to dismantle Palestinian society from within.

‘The plan is advancing successfully’

“Crime is a strategic project of the state, whose ultimate goal is ‘voluntary emigration’ of Palestinians,” Makhoul argued. “This policy is not limited to Gaza or the West Bank — it also applies to Palestinian citizens living inside the Green Line. And it’s already happening, especially among educated young people and professionals in fields like medicine and high-tech.”

Makhoul pointed to the state’s deliberate inaction in tackling crime as part of a broader effort to push Palestinian citizens to the margins of public discourse. “The Israeli right, led by Netanyahu, is systematically working to push Palestinian citizens into complete despair because they are an electoral bloc that threatens his continued rule,” he said.

“Even budgets allocated to the so-called ‘fight against crime,’ are being used to pursue those who are actually fighting against it,” Makhoul said. As examples, he cites the increased use of administrative detentions against nonviolent activists like Raja Eghbaria, along with the recent ban on the “Spreading Peace Committee,” a conflict mediation group operating under the High Follow-Up Committee for Arab Citizens of Israel.

Ghasan Munir, an activist with the banned committee, experienced this firsthand when Shin Bet agents summoned him and ordered him to cease his peacebuilding work. “Instead of going after criminals and murderers, they go after those trying to solve the problems,” Munir told +972. “This is how a society is dismantled, and this is what a deliberate policy looks like. And the truth is, it worked — Arab citizens no longer take to the streets, no longer protest, no longer make demands.”

Munir is a resident of Ramle, a mixed Palestinian-Jewish city in central Israel, that, along with the adjacent city of Lod/Lyd, has seen a particularly high spike in violent crime in recent years. On April 10, two brothers from the city’s Jawaris neighborhood, Jalal and Mateen al-Shamali, were murdered near their home. Over the last few years, two other brothers from the same family were also killed.

This phenomenon — of two, three, or even four murder victims from the same family — has become disturbingly common over the past few years. The situation has deteriorated to such an extent that even the right wing mayor of Lod, Yair Revivo, who is affiliated with Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, accused the government of seeking to “get rid of the Arabs” by allowing the murders to continue unchecked.

“What’s been happening in Ramle is made possible primarily by the high availability of weapons, and because the police don’t arrest the murderers,” Munir explained. “The officers show up, count the bullets, and leave. This has been the situation for years, but it has significantly worsened since [National Security Minister Itamar] Ben Gvir came into office.”

In this environment, many Palestinians now believe that the Israeli state is empowering criminal organizations as part of a wider, “well-organized, and carefully planned transfer policy” to drive Palestinian citizens out of Israel, as a widely-shared anonymous social media post recently claimed. “The first stage is eliminating the sense of personal security and replacing it with existential fear. This is what is leading to the disappearance of the middle class in Arab society — the very layer that can afford to escape this bloody cycle of violence to mixed [Palestinian-Jewish] cities, or out of the country altogether.”

Arab villages, the post continues, are forced to pay protection fees “until they close their doors and their owners leave the village, or even the country.” This, it added, is part of a “systematic process aimed at eliminating the economic capacity of Arab society, undermining personal security, and draining the society of its productive classes.”

The post also pointed to Ben Gvir, the far-right lawmaker who became Israel’s National Security Minister in 2022, as one of the main reasons for the recent escalation. “Every drop of Arab blood spilled is a success for him, not a failure. Every additional victim is proof that the plan is advancing successfully,” the anonymous post read. “That’s why the daily reports of the number of murder victims won’t disturb them — not Ben Gvir, not Netanyahu, and not the Jewish public in Israel. For them, it’s evidence of the plan’s success.”

‘This is not a glitch’

Nibal Ardat, Policy Advocacy Coordinator at the Mossawa Center, a civil society organization promoting equality for Palestinians citizens in Israel, told +972 that the crisis was not the result of “negligence” on the part of the government or police. “That definition only blurs the depth of the problem. This is a much broader phenomenon, one that isn’t just about crime and violence, but touches nearly every aspect of life.”

Last month, she filed a petition to the High Court of Justice against the Civil Service Commission, where, despite being tasked with enforcing fair representation in government offices, Palestinian citizens make up only 2 percent of the workforce. “When you combine this with low employment rates, budget cuts, systemic restrictions, political persecution, and ongoing neglect of organized crime, a clear picture emerges: this is not a glitch – this is policy.”

Ardat highlights cases like that of attorney Roy Kahlon, whom Netnayahu appointed as Civil Service Commissioner despite his failed tenure heading the government’s Arab crime task force, during which the murder rate soared. “This is what a system looks like when it treats Arab citizens as if they don’t exist,” she said.

Attorney Rawyah Handaqlu, director of the Emergency Headquarters to Combat Crime and Violence in Arab Society, told +972 that an accumulation of factors, including “police’s failure to solve 85 percent of murders and relentless anti-Palestinian incitement, has deepened the crisis of trust in government institutions, [and led to the widespread] feeling that this is a conspiracy against us.”

The escalation in crime, she emphasized, “is not a one-time occurrence, but a continuous process, each wave surpassing the last in brutality. This can no longer be seen only as a social or economic issue — it is first and foremost a political problem.”

Like other activists +972 interviewed, Handaqlu described the crisis as deliberate and systematic: “We are not dealing with an absence of policy, but with an active policy, one that ignores crime and allows organizations to fill the vacuum that the state knowingly creates. The loss of personal security and the breakdown of society are the direct results of discriminatory and deliberate policy against Palestinian citizens of the state.”

Yet Handaqlu and her team persist in their grassroots resistance. “We fully recognize the enormity of these challenges,” she told +972, “but we remain committed to our multi-pronged approach.” With a government that has “repeatedly demonstrated that our safety and lives don’t matter,” their strategy is clear: “We’re transforming policy from the ground up, building collective power in our communities, and creating a new reality from below that eventually reaches the highest decision-making levels.”

A version of this article was first published in Hebrew on Local Call. Read it here.