Palestinian citizen of Israel shot dead in northern town amid ongoing crime wave

A 52-year-old Palestinian citizen of Israel was shot dead in a car in the town of al-Sha’ab in northern Israel on Tuesday.

He was identified as Muhammad Abbas and lived in the nearby town of Nahf. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz said that he was the 147^th Palestinian citizen of Israel murdered this year, among an ongoing crime wave affecting Palestinian communities inside Israel’s borders.

Abbas’s son Rafat was killed two years ago, Haaretz reported.

Israeli police were searching for the perpetrator on Tuesday morning. They said that the incident was related to a feud between Palestinian “crime families” in northern Israel.

The number of Palestinian victims of crime in Israel this year already exceeds the total number for 2022.

In the past two months, four people from the town Nahf were killed.

Palestinian citizens of Israel form over 20% of Israel’s population. They are the descendants of Palestinians who did not flee the ethnic cleansing by Zionist militias which accompanied the 1948 creation of Israel.

They suffer from systematic discrimination in Israel and have long protested Israeli government inaction regarding the ongoing crime wave in their community.

Last week, Israel’s extreme-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich withheld millions of dollars worth of funds, some of which were earmarked for combatting crime, from Palestinian communities in Israel.