When murder’s not enough: Arab crime groups in Israel resorting to ever more vicious methods
Mothers who lost children to crime in the Arab community protest in front of the public security minister’s home, September 2021
Deiaa Haj Yahia reports in Haaretz on 11 September 2024:
Rabia Araidi was sitting at home with his family in the northern Israeli town of Maghar in the Lower Galilee when a sudden banging on the door interrupted their peaceful evening. Before anyone reached the door, several masked men burst in, grabbed Araidi and began dragging him outside as his young son watched in horror. The family was left utterly terrified.
Araidi’s dismembered body was found hours later in an open field near the town. He had been beheaded. Several crime organizations issued a message claiming responsibility for the killing and made its intent clear: a warning against being affiliated with the Abu Latif crime family.
The murder of Araidi, 43, who was connected to the Abu Latif crime organization, exemplifies the noticeably more extreme methods of operation currently being employed by organized crime in the Arab community. The various organizations have been fighting one another for some years now, but lately they have been resorting to even more brutal methods. Some are now employing a kind of violence never-before seen in Israel, even in the world of organized crime. People are saying that, over the past year, places that were once considered safe, such as private homes, cafes and quiet streets have become the site of actions reminiscent of the cartel wars in South America.
The growing brutality is happening in tandem with a steady increase in the number of murders in Arab society. So far this year, 194 people have been murdered. The total for all of 2023, a peak year for the murder rate, was 241. Now the criminals are kidnapping victims from their homes or off the street, executing them and then desecrating and abandoning the corpses. In some cases, the likes of which were seen for the first time in 2023, armed men burst into homes and murdered entire families. “Such instances used to be rare, and occurred only once every few years, but now it is something that is happening rather frequently,” says a police official who investigates organized crime in northern Israel. He says that such extreme violence is sharply increasing now and penetrating every corner of the Arab community, leaving behind a trail of blood and pain.
And while their actions are becoming ever more brutal, the criminals are also becoming a lot more sophisticated, as can be seen in the Araidi case. A police official who is working on the case says that the murderers did not leave evidence behind, and even rinsed the victim’s decapitated head with bleach to remove their DNA. Araidi, who was abducted and executed on June 12, was not the last victim of the bitter rivalries taking place among the crime organizations. On July 28, the body of Amal Asakaleh, 28, also from Maghar, was discovered next to the Ka’abiya-Tabash-Hajajra local council in the north.
Askala was kidnapped near his home, and police suspect that his murder was a direct result of the war between the Abu Latif crime family, with which he was associated, and several other crime organizations that joined forces – the Na’imi brothers from Jadeidi-Makr, and the faction that broke off from the Hariri family that includes Yusef Wisam Hariri. A few months before, in April, the remains of two more young men associated with the Abu Latif crime family – Amid Abu Rukun and Tamer Khayuf – were found near Maghar. Signs of extreme violence were evident on their bodies, which were in an advanced state of decomposition. One had also been decapitated.
A criminal affiliated with one of the crime organizations in the north attributes these kidnappings and murders to outside hitmen who are unable to oppose an order from the crime organizations, since their refusal to comply could also be seen as a pretext for killing them. He says the increasingly extreme methods being used by the crime organizations in the area derive from their fear of losing their territory. They resort to ever more extreme violence in order to deter their rivals. “These actions have a single purpose – to deter the competing organization and send a message to its members. We’re in a very dangerous situation. When one organization raises the threshold of violence, the other organization will also do so,” he says.
A message to society
Someone in the police who is well-acquainted with Arab crime organizations in Israel says, “The thing about them is that they adapt very rapidly to changes in the environment, such as competition from other crime organizations and external pressures such as increased police activity. Their patterns of behavior in these situations could be to increase the use of violence in order to intimidate other organizations or to sow chaos. They won’t hesitate to use more violence in order to preserve their power and intimidate rivals and potential collaborators, or even police officers.”
He describes an “ethical deterioration among the crime organizations – We see it in the greater level of brutality, the torture and the physical and mental harm done to victims, to rivals and even to other members of the crime organization. There are some crime organizations that are using severe torture as a method of intimidation, to force victims to cooperate with them, or to force people to leave a rival criminal organization.”
He says these methods include, “kidnappings, severe physical harm, and ongoing emotional abuse with the intent of breaking the victims’ spirit or sending a message to rivals. The criminals also frequently film their actions and spread the images on social media.” He adds, “This kind of behavior broadly affects the community. It spreads fear, does economic damage, and affects people’s level of trust, which makes it harder for the police to collect evidence and take witness statements.”
Attorney Reda Jaber, a legal scholar and former director of the Aman Center — the Arab Center for a Safe Society, says, “The escalation is part of the natural development of criminality. When conflicts between criminals reach high levels of violence, the level of sensitivity towards the victims goes down significantly. Each organization is trying to send the other organization a clear message that it has increased its level of ‘performance’ and brutality, as a way of instilling deterrence. Not only does this create competition between the criminals, it directly affects the entire community.”
Jaber also says that “part of the idea is to send a clear message to the whole community, which you are exploiting economically: If there is a threat, it will be made good on in the most brutal way possible. As a result, people react in fear and more readily let the criminals control them, to the point where they give up and accept the criminals’ presence as inevitable. Aside from the effects on the general society, the increasing violence is meant to convey the message to other criminal elements that you have no limits in terms of the level of violence and cruelty to which you will resort and also in terms of the widening of the circle of victims – from the first and closest circle to the second or even the third circle. And then the other criminal feels a need to respond with even more brutality, and so it becomes an endless cycle of increasing viciousness.”
It’s important, Jaber adds, to remember that “criminality is a learned behavior. Criminals learn from local experiences, from what is happening around them, and if people see that something is possible – they will do it too. The escalation of violence also affects the criminal himself, to the point where his sensitivity to hurting another person basically drops to zero. A criminal who decapitates his victim has become a savage. He undergoes an internal change in which he sheds the kind of personal considerations and social framework that previously held him back. The norms that were once upheld in the criminal world are being broken, and this world is getting closer than ever to boundless savagery.”
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