Murders in Arab sector a 'national plague', Herzog says

The wave of “murderous” crime violence is a “national plague,” President Isaac Herzog said on Monday after a 24-year-old was killed in Haifa, marking the 68th homicide in the Arab-Israeli sector in 2023.

“This is civil terror – yes, civil terror – that is threatening us all, and we all must come together against it immediately,” the president said.

Herzog called on elected officials, public leaders, the National Security Council and the justice system to begin a series of emergency meetings and make “decisive and aggressive” decisions, and to “stop with the concerns and excuses, act with all tools, and lead a relentless, all-out war, to eradicate the threat immediately.”

The victim, Hanan Abu Hait, was shot and killed while sitting in her car near her home in Haifa early on Monday.

Emergency situation arises

Politicians and nonprofit organizations also called on the government to improve its performance on crime.

The Abraham Initiatives, a nonprofit for positive social change in the field of Jewish-Arab relations in Israel, said “not just the lives of the Arabs have been abandoned – but the life of all of us. This is an emergency situation, and someone needs to start working.”

The organization also criticized Otzma Yehudit MK Zvika Fogel’s decision to cancel all Knesset National Security Committee meetings as part of a political rift with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The committee was “wrongfully being used as a bargaining chip,” the organization said.

The Knesset’s Committee on the Status of Women and Gender Equality held an emergency meeting on Monday. There, the committee learned that out of 13 women who have been murdered so far this year, only one had complained beforehand about domestic violence.

Labor leader MK Merav Michaeli said during the meeting, “The blood is crying out in unfathomable numbers from the ground. Everything that came up [in the meeting] – coordination between ministries, economic violence and treatment of violent men – was not done, because women are a negligible minority in politics and do not influence the budget.”

Hadash-Ta’al MK Ahmad Tibi brought up in a press conference the killing of Diar Omri, which he claimed on Sunday was “cold-blooded murder” at the hands of a Jewish suspect. Tibi used his parliamentary immunity to post on Twitter the details of the suspect, despite it being prohibited. The MK justified this by arguing that without doing so the victim would have been blamed as being a terrorist, which he said was not true.