Report: 20 women killed by a family member or partner in Israel in 2024, half of them Arab

A protest against domestic violence in Tel Aviv in 2023

Rachel Fink reports in Haaretz on 25 November 2024:

On the eve of International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women on November 25th, an annual report published by The Israel Observatory on Femicide (IOF) which tracks femicide rates in Israel highlights both consistent trends as well as an increasing divergence between police records and the organization’s data.

The IOF was established in 2020 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem to collect and study data on the issue of femicide, defined among experts as “the intentional killing of women because they are female, including so-called ‘honor killing’, matricide, and murder committed by a partner or family member.” As part of their work, the organization publishes its annual statistics of gender-based murder in Israel.

According to this year’s report, there have been 20 cases of femicide in Israel thus far, almost the same as in all of 2023. In the vast majority of cases, the victim knew the murderer/suspect and in half of the cases the murderer was her husband. In other cases, the suspects were family members, primarily brothers or sons. The average age of the female victims is 40 years old, with the youngest being 24, and the oldest, 72.

The Founder and Director of the IOF, Dr. Shalva Weil said that 20 cases of femicide are “twenty too many.”  “This is something that we can get under control,” she said. According to her, violence prevention is a crucial component. She points to the Arab community to illustrate her point. According to IOF data, half of this year’s victims were Israeli Arabs, despite only representing 21% of the general population.

“Of those cases, many occurred within the Bedouin community, where we know that police are not doing enough to curb violence,” Weil points out. “Very few Bedouin women will go to the police to report domestic abuse or familial violence. But if they did, if they felt the police would actually act on their complaints, this would go a long way in mitigating so-called ‘honor killings’.”

Statistics themselves can be an important preventative tool, Weil says. “For several years,” she asserts, “we have been able to study the data and predicate which groups are likely to be at risk. Then we can, for instance, dispatch social workers into those specific communities.”

Weil highlights one other data point from the report that she would like to call the public’s attention to – the murder weapon. In 2024, 40 percent of female murder victims were stabbed to death. Of the remaining cases, some of which are still under investigation, many of the victims were found with clear signs of violence on their body, including from strangulation, burning, bruises from a blunt object and the like. Surprisingly, only in 2 cases (10 percent) were the women killed by gunfire.

As such, Weil cautions against overgeneralizing access to guns as a primary cause of femicide. “This just is not what the data is telling us,” she says. “Which means even well-intended efforts to block gun licenses will not solve the problem.”

Eighty-five Thousand femicide cases globally in 2023
In addition to demographic statistics, this year’s IOF report also highlights a worrying trend – namely, the gap between the organization’s data and police records. According to Israel’s Freedom of Information Law, the police are required to provide the records to IOF. While it reported 29 murders of women in 2024, IOF documented 37 (this includes femicide as well as criminal cases).

This 22 percent disparity points to a lack of follow-through when it comes to investigating and prosecuting cases of gender-based murder, particularly in the Arab community. This year, only 56 percent of cases involving Jewish women have resulted in indictment, a figure that plunges to 17 percent when the victim is Arab.

According to Weil, this apathy extends far beyond the police force. “Keeping women alive is simply not a priority for Israel’s government,” she states. “Both because they are women but also because, as war rages on, saving lives in general is not a priority for this government.”

Also on Monday, the UN released a report by UN Women and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, that includes data on femicide that was collected from all over the world. The report reveals that globally, an average of 140 women are killed everyday by a partner or family member. In 2023, an estimated 85,000 women were killed by men – 51,000 of them were killed by someone close to them.

A report published last week by Israel’s Association of Rape Crisis Centers (ARCCI) revealed troubling data regarding other gender-based crimes. According to the ARCCI report, 81 percent of sexual assault and harassment complaints in Israel were closed without an indictment being filed. 59 percent of complaints received by crisis centers involved harm to minors under 18, and 28 percent involved victims under the age of 12.

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