By Zeena Saifi, Jeremy Diamond, CNN
Sakhnin, Israel (CNN) — A mother shot dead outside a supermarket. A man killed after leaving a mosque. A doctor gunned down while treating patients. These shocking cases are no longer anomalies: they are the toll of a violent crime epidemic sweeping across Israel.
The victims are all Palestinian citizens of Israel. Homicides in their community have risen so dramatically that one person has been killed every day on average this year. Palestinian citizens make up 20% of the country’s population, and many say the Israeli government has not only failed to curb the crime wave, but that its inaction has helped spur a cycle of violence largely perpetrated by Arab organized crime groups.
The data bears out a stark inequality: Israel Police has solved just 15% of homicides in Israel’s Arab communities versus 65% among Jewish Israelis, according to data from Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, and Eilaf, the Center for Advancing Security in Arab Society.
Palestinian citizens of Israel are descendants of those who were not expelled or forced to flee their homes when Israel was established in 1948. They were given citizenship but lived under military rule until 1966, and many say they continue to face discrimination in Israeli society.
Last year was the deadliest on record for the community, with 252 killed – the vast majority by gunfire – according to a report published by Abraham Initiatives, a group that advances social inclusion and equal rights for Israel’s Palestinian citizens.
And 2026 is already off to a bloody start, with 46 killed so far, according to the group.
It is a deadly reality that has raised alarm bells, with tens of thousands of the country’s Palestinian citizens taking to the streets in recent weeks – joined by some Jewish Israelis – to demand government action.
“No to killing, no to death, we want to live in justice,” demonstrators chanted in Arabic at a January protest in Sakhnin, a majority Palestinian city in northern Israel, which drew tens of thousands of people.
Attendees told CNN it was the largest demonstration the Arab community has seen in years, culminating a multi-day general strike from shop owners.
What began there has since grown into a nationwide protest movement, with strikes and demonstrations taking place almost daily across Israel. Streets across the country were filled with a sea of black flags and water fountains were dyed red as citizens declared a “national day of disruption.”
A week after the Sakhnin strike, Israeli President Isaac Herzog made a rare visit to the city, where he met with local Arab authorities and protest organizers.
He said the fight against crime and violence in the Arab community “must be at the very top of the national priorities and be addressed with the utmost determination” calling it a “moral obligation.”
And on Thursday, Israel’s Police Commissioner Daniel Levi declared crime in the Arab community “a state of national emergency” and “an intolerable situation that must stop.”
He called on other government agencies to join the police in helping address the issue.
‘Let them kill each other’
For many Palestinian citizens of Israel, those declarations ring hollow. Qasem Awad has waited for more than a year for his son’s killer to be brought to justice.
His son, Abdullah, a doctor from Mazra’a in the western Galilee, was treating a mother and her two children at a clinic last February when a masked gunman walked in and fatally shot him at close range. He was 30 at the time.
Abdullah had been filling in for another doctor that day. H