In rare protest, thousands of 1948 Palestinians take to the streets against rising organised crime

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who stayed in their lands and homes after the 1948 Nakba and forcibly accepted Israeli citizenship took to the streets this week across Israeli cities in an unprecedented show of public rage.

On Tuesday, Palestinians staged coordinated disruptions, shutting down major intersections in Jerusalem, Beersheba, and Haifa, painting fountain waters red in symbolic protest, and blocking Tel Aviv's central Ayalon Street. Medical teams walked off the job. Tech firms closed their doors. University students joined families of murder victims in demonstrations outside the homes of top government officials.

The scale of the uprising reflects a community in crisis. In 2025 alone, 252 Palestinians in Israel were killed by firearms. Another source documents 245 murders from organised crime, with one death approximately every two days.

From Wednesday night through Thursday night this week, six people were killed in organised crime shootings across Palestinian towns in the 1948-occupied territories within approximately eight hours, bringing the 2026 death toll to 47, including 16 in February alone.

Victims include Farid Abu Mubarak, 20, shot in Shuqaib al-Salam in the Negev; Mukhtar Abu Mudeghem, 22, son of a former Rahat mayor, found shot dead in his vehicle in Rahat; Sheikh Najib Hamd Abu Reish, shot on his way to work in Yirka; Hussein Saleh Abu Raqiq, 65, killed in Lod; Mohammed Qassem, 47, shot while heading to work in al-Fureidis; and Wafaa Awad, 40-year-old, shot when she left her home in Tamra in northern occupied Palestine, according to the Palestinian Media Centre.

"If our children's lives are not normal, then the entire state's life should not be normal," said Ayman Odeh, head of the Arab Democratic Change list and one of the few Arab members of Knesset to lead street protests alongside party colleagues Mansour Abbas and Aida Toma Sleiman.

"We hold the government accountable as a partner in these organised crimes through its deliberate neglect, which aims to force 1948 Palestinian citizens of Israel to emigrate," he said.

Odeh, in this talk to The New Arab, pointed to a staggering toll: 2,600 murders since 2000. He demanded the Israeli state "take responsibility for curbing unlicensed weapons and organised crime, rather than allowing what he called a two-faced police approach, excessive force against Palestinians coupled with neglect of community safety."

"The question is: what will we do?" Odeh said, turning the demand inward to his own community.

A mother's anguish

The murders have become numbingly routine. On 6 January, Asmahan Ghawi received a phone call at 9:15 pm from her son, Mahmoud, a 23-year-old barber in Kafr Qara with dreams of helping his family survive. She was preparing dinner for him. He was laughing, his young voice filling the line, when gunshots cut through the call.

She rushed to his barber shop, barely breathing, tears streaming down her face. She found Mahmoud lying in a pool of blood surrounded by neighbours and friends. The perpetrator was never caught.

"How will I continue my life without him? How will I face the coming days? Every moment reminds me of his absence," she told TNA.

The very next evening, another family's world was shattered in nearly identical circumstances.

When the delivery arrived at the Abu Arar home on 7 January, masked gunmen opened fire. Twenty-three-year-old Mahmoud Abu Arar, a first-year medical student in Georgia, United States, who was visiting his family, fell to the ground. He died instantly.

The delivery person who witnessed the crime wept, according to Abu Arar’s mother. He said, "I didn't want that. If I had known, I would have told you!"

These were not outliers. According to UN data from early 2023, the murder rate in Arab communities inside Israel is three times the national average. Youth under 30 comprise 54 per cent of victims.

Political neglect

At the heart of the crisis lies what analysts describe as systemic abandonment.

Hanieda Ghanem, director of the Palestinian Centre for Israeli Studies, attributes the surge not merely to individual violence but to decades of political marginalisation that have fractured community bonds.

"The Palestinian minority faces a complex set of challenges rooted in their status as a national minority living in an environment they perceive as foreign and hostile," Ghanem explained to TNA. "This breeds feelings of marginalisation and exclusion from political and social spheres."

She points to two historical ruptures that shaped Palestinian identity inside Israel: the 1948 Nakba, which severed cultural and social ties to their homeland, and the Oslo Accords era, which disconnected Palestinians from the broader Palestinian cause and intensified individualism at the expense of collective solidarity.

"Palestinian communities live in a state of perpetual psychological tension," Ghanem said. "The security system operates within a complex context that reveals a gap between official statements and actual practices on the ground."

Ayman Odeh was more direct about police complicity. He highlighted what he called a fundamental paradox: excessive force deployed against Palestinians in some contexts, combined with deliberate neglect and resource starvation. Most critically, he noted, the Israeli government licenses weapons to civilians in Palestinian communities, creating an arsenal that fuels organised crime.

"There are unreasonable quantities of unlicensed weapons circulating in Palestinian communities, and the state has failed to address this," Odeh said. "As a result, the likelihood of arresting a criminal in Arab communities is far lower than in Jewish communities."

Sami Abu Shahada, head of the National Gathering, blamed the absence of Palestinian intellectual and middle-class leadership from civil and political spaces. "Their preoccupation with personal interests rather than building community awareness and organisation has exacerbated chaos and violence," he said.

The state, Abu Shahada argued, maintains Palestinians in marginality and insecurity through selective enforcement of law, strict application against Palestinians, and permissive tolerance in Jewish communities.

"This deepens feelings of injustice and discrimination, making it harder for Palestinians to develop their communities and manage their affairs effectively," Abu Shahada said.

Systemic failure

Rawia Handaklo, director of the Eilaf Centre for promoting safety in Arab communities, reframed 2025 as a turning point that exposed systematic escalation.

"It is no longer simply about rising numbers of dead," she said. "Violence has become a continuous, organised reality affecting the daily lives of Palestinians. Behind every victim are dozens of wounded people living with ongoing psychological trauma and suffering, with no protection or support."

Official data confirms the breadth of harm: 450 people injured alongside the hundreds killed. For Handaklo, this represents a deep civic security crisis with consequences stretching far into the future.

"This is not merely about acknowledging failures," she emphasised. "It requires building a strategy to confront internal terror, unifying efforts to achieve safety and stability. This demands involving all segments of society to achieve shared interests, efforts rooted in strengthening cultural and social values, building structures that support collective identity, and empowering individuals to reclaim their active role in the community."

On the other hand, Psychologist Riba Abu Ghosh stressed the psychological toll. Rising murder rates create a permanent climate of fear and anxiety, triggering widespread disorders: Anxiety, depression, and loss of trust in one's social environment.

"Many have lost family members or lived through traumatic experiences during crimes," she said. "These events leave deep psychological marks affecting their education and family relationships."

Educational and community institutions, Abu Ghosh argued, bear responsibility for providing psychological support through professional programs, mental health workshops, and specialised staff to assist the affected, "to restore a sense of trust and safety in our community."

A movement escalates

The Tuesday disruption marked a visible escalation of an organised campaign. Over 100 families of murder victims have launched a coordinated escalation program, demanding that the state take immediate, serious action against organised crime.

Dozens of organisations joined: health workers staged one-hour walkouts across major hospitals—Rambam, Ziv, Soroka, Beilinson, Wolfson, Sheba, Assaf Harofeh, Schneider, Shalfata, Beit Levonstein, and the French Hospital in Nazareth, among them. Academic institutions, including Ben-Gurion University and Tel Aviv University, participated. High-tech companies and the Sarona complex in Tel Aviv shuttered operations. Social workers' unions mobilised.

Police arrested seven activists from the "Standing Together" movement during the protests.

But families vowed to continue. As one statement from bereaved parents declared: "Despite its cost, this struggle is a duty to our sons and daughters who are gone, and to the right of the Palestinian Arab community inside to life, security, and dignity."

This article is produced in collaboration with Egab.