The Media Line: Families Face Fear as Weapons Smuggling Keeps Crime in Arab Israeli Cities Uncontained 

Families Face Fear as Weapons Smuggling Keeps Crime in Arab Israeli Cities Uncontained 

As killings reach historic levels, business owners, families, and activists describe a vacuum of enforcement, a flood of illegal weapons, and a daily life shaped by silence and intimidation 

By Giorgia Valente/The Media Line 

In Nazareth’s Old City, Amani Tatour, former owner of Amani Café and Café Mohn in Berlin, had turned her café into a social hub over the years—particularly for young people—before violence forced her to shut its doors. 

Thirteen bullets were fired at the café’s door one night in February 2025. Tatour told The Media Line she still does not understand why it happened: “Until today, I don’t know why. No one called. No one asked for protection. I was left completely alone with my questions.” 

Her experience now sits inside a rapidly escalating national story that stretches from the north to the south. On Wednesday, January 7, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu toured the Negev with Defense Minister Israel Katz and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, alongside senior security officials, and said the region was “out of control,” pledging to “rein it in.” 

From a lookout near Revivim overlooking the Bedouin town of Bir Hadaj, officials briefed Netanyahu on weapons possession and smuggling routes, with Police Commissioner Danny Levy and Shin Bet chief David Zini among those present. Netanyahu said the “criminal threat and the security threat blend into one,” citing “tens of thousands of weapons,” drone trafficking, and cross-border smuggling. He framed the crackdown as part of a broader “national project” to “return the Negev to the State of Israel,” linking enforcement to frontier development and what his office described as efforts to “regularize” Bedouin land claims. Ben Gvir said the operation would continue “as long as necessary.” 

The visit came as Arab communities entered 2026 with another wave of killings. Arab society ended 2025 with 252 homicide victims, according to the Abraham Initiatives organization, making it the deadliest year on record. The first week of January 2026 then saw at least seven additional killings, including a father and son shot dead in Nazareth and another victim in Kafr Qara. On January 7, three men were shot dead in Shefa-Amr in what police suspected was tied to a war between crime families, bringing the toll in the Arab community to 11 in a week. 

For Tatour, the official declarations of control collide with memories of confusion and inaction after the shooting. She said she went to the police and got little more than blank stares. “I went to the police station, and they had no clue. I asked them if they checked the cameras in the streets, and they said no.” 

With no visible progress, she said, she tried to facilitate the investigation herself by approaching neighbors for footage. “I asked my neighbors privately if they would give their cameras to the police. They agreed. But no one from the police ever came to check them.” 

Instead, she said, officers began questioning people in the streets around the Old City, a tactic that left her exposed in a community where trust in law enforcement is low. “They started stopping random people and asking about the café. This put me in the spotlight.” The experience, she said, created its own backlash. “Being questioned in the street is humiliating. And humiliation creates even more anger and fear.” 

Faced with rumors and rising tension, Tatour decided to go public. “I decided not to be silent. I invited people to the café and told my side of the story. I showed them the bullets.” 

The response, she said, revealed how fear operates in plain sight—loud online and quiet on the street. “Almost half a million people saw the post online. But only about 120 people came in person.” Support, she added, tended to arrive in private messages rather than public solidarity. “People talked to me privately all the time, not publicly. That’s when I understood how afraid people are.” 

Her café—once a symbol of youth culture and communal life in the Old City—had become a space where fear was more visible than solidarity. 

Months later, violence escalated inside the café itself. After a customer was politely asked not to smoke a joint at a table, a confrontation erupted, and Tatour’s mother stepped in to calm the situation. “My mother stood in front of him and told him to stop. He hit her on the head with a big stick.” 

Her mother needed eight stitches, and the man who struck her remains free, Tatour said. “After seven days, I saw him posting on Instagram, walking freely in the city. After 16 days, the police still hadn’t caught him and probably never will.” 

Tatour said she suspects possible links to criminal networks but emphasized that it is a sensitive issue. “I have a feeling about who is behind it. But I prefer not to talk about it.” 

The attack forced her to step back entirely, turning a community dream into an impossible risk calculation. “I had to decide whether to reopen the café or not. It was a community place, but this is my mother. I can’t put my family, my staff, my customers at risk.” 

She closed both cafés and took a pause from her work. “I needed time to understand how I want to come back—if I want to come back. For the first time in my life, I feel lost.” She is now trying to find a new occupation and a new way to engage. “I had a dream for the Old City, for young people, for community life. I don’t see that future right now.” 

Yet leaving remains unresolved. “My grandparents stayed here. Staying here is a struggle and a form of resistance as a Palestinian.” Tatour said she still intends to find a way forward without leaving. “I’m not going to leave the country for these bad people, I will find my way back in different ways,” she concluded. 

As the toll climbed toward the end of 2025, Israeli President Isaac Herzog described the surge of violence in Arab communities as “a national burden” and warned against continuing to “turn a blind eye” to what he framed as a crisis threatening Israeli society as a whole. His remarks followed months of mounting pressure from civil society groups and local leaders, as homicide figures in Arab towns reached record levels. 

Behind the numbers lies a complex ecosystem of organized crime, fear, economic pressure, and institutional failure—one that has left ordinary families, women, and children paying the heaviest price. 

For Rawyah Handaqlu, founder and lead of Eilaf—Center for Advancing Security in Arab Society, the crisis cannot be understood as isolated criminal acts or as the work of loosely organized family clans. “We are not talking about normal violence that exists in every country,” she told The Media Line. “We are talking about organized crime that controls Arab society. This is similar to what happened in Italy with the mafia.” 

She argues that the structure has evolved beyond family feuds into organized, territorial enterprises. “We don’t really talk about families anymore. We talk about organizations. They may have started as families, but today they are illegal organizations that divide cities, control territories, and fight over money and power.” 

Those organizations, Handaqlu said, operate across borders and sectors, blending legitimate business with criminal revenue streams. “They have legal and illegal businesses inside Israel and outside Israel. Construction, real estate, car companies, security companies, car washes, beauty clinics—these are all fields where money can be laundered, especially because of cash.” 

Weapons smuggling is a core pillar of the system, she said, and it ties directly into the government’s focus on the Negev. “The Negev is a key source of weapons trafficking. These weapons move from there to cities in the north and center. This is how criminal organizations maintain control.” 

In her view, the result is an alternative authority structure—one that fills the vacuum where residents believe the state has failed. “Criminal organizations replaced the government. People don’t go to the police. They go to criminals for money, for protection, for solutions.” 

That dynamic fuels protection rackets and deepens the fear created by low clearance rates. “When murder cases are not solved, families remain afraid, and the community around them becomes afraid. People distance themselves because they don’t know who did it, why, or who will be next.” The silence that follows is not only social; she described it as enforced. “People are afraid even to write a post on Facebook about crime and violence. Criminal organizations threaten people who speak.” 

Although perpetrators are overwhelmingly young men, Handaqlu said the harm spreads far wider. “Women are the double victims. Even when they are not directly involved, they pay the highest price.” She described how women can be drawn into criminal ecosystems through vulnerability and manipulation. “Young women enter relationships with criminals, thinking this is survival or a way to live better. Later, they are abused and used—to collect information, to move stolen cars, to deliver things.” 

Children, too, are caught in the fallout. “Fourteen children were murdered in 2025. Children should never be victims of crime and violence.” 

Only 15% of murder cases in Arab communities have been solved over the past two years, compared with more than 60% in Jewish communities, according to figures cited by Handaqlu. “When only 15% of cases are solved, criminal organizations feel they have a green light, especially amid more than two years of war in the country and economic hardships caused by Smotrich’s budget cutting.” 

Beyond the numbers, she described a mistrust that has hardened into a barrier to cooperation. “There is no trust. People don’t believe the police will protect them, and they are afraid that involvement will only make things worse.” She linked that mistrust to political choices and rhetoric. “The minister of national security tries to connect crime and violence with terrorism. This treats Arab society as an enemy, not as civilians who are suffering. If crime is treated as terror, it means there will be two parallel legal systems in Israel—one for Arabs and one for Jews. This harms democracy itself.” 

Recent official government responses and policy proposals have centered on an enforcement-first approach, with an expanding national-security frame. Katz issued an administrative detention order in December against a Bedouin suspect in an arms-smuggling case—an uncommon use of a measure typically associated with security offenses. 

At the policy level, there has been a push to redirect portions of Arab economic-development funding toward enforcement: creating a national police unit focused on “mid-level crime in Arab society,” upgrading law-enforcement technology and data integration, and establishing a national intelligence unit aimed at organized crime in the Arab sector, with significant allocations tied to 2025–2026. 

According to reports in the Israeli press, Ben Gvir’s ministry used only about half of the designated crime-fighting budget for Arab society as the murder rate climbed, and described discussions that would expand Shin Bet involvement in combating serious crime in Arab communities—an unprecedented role in non-security crime. 

For Jumanna Haj Ali, from Shefa-Amr, the consequences of this system became personal in 2025, when her brother Jameel Khalilah was killed—most likely by criminal networks—despite not being involved in crime. “When I saw him, he looked as if he was sleeping,” she told The Media Line. “The doctors told me the bullets were all over his body, and there was nothing they could do.” 

The speed of the loss, she said, still feels impossible to absorb. “After a quarter of an hour, they told me he was gone.” 

She described the sudden rupture of everyday life. “We used to wake up together. We used to start our day together. He was not only my brother. He was my friend, my beloved.” Time, she said, has not eased the pain. “With time, it doesn’t become easier. What happens with time is even more difficult.” 

From criminal networks functioning as parallel authorities, to women and children bearing the cost, to families mourning loved ones with no connection to crime, the violence tearing through Arab communities inside Israel is not a single story. It is structural, cumulative, and unresolved. As 2026 begins with another string of deaths, Herzog’s warning about a “national burden” echoes against a deeper question voiced quietly across these communities: whether acknowledgment will translate into protection—or whether fear, silence, and abandonment will continue to define daily life.