Her Story
The Abraham Initiatives counted a record 23 Arab women killed in Israel
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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Of the 252 Palestinian citizens of Israel killed in criminal violence during 2025, twenty-three were women — the highest annual figure the Abraham Initiatives has recorded since it began keeping the count, according to the organisation's summary report on Arab murder victims of crime and violence.
The monitor separates the circumstances rather than merging them. Some of the women were killed by relatives or partners. Others were killed by criminal organisations, or in revenge shootings aimed at their families and households. Grouping the two into one number, as official Israeli reporting tends to, hides which institution failed in which way.
What happens to the file afterwards#
Whatever the circumstance, the file behaves the same way. The Abraham Initiatives found this year that Israeli police solved about twelve per cent of homicides in Arab communities, against roughly sixty-five per cent when the victim is Jewish. The same organisation put the 2026 toll past 140 by the middle of the year and past 160 by August, running about twelve per cent ahead of the record year it follows.
That closure rate is the second sentence of every one of these deaths. A woman is buried, and the investigation into who killed her joins the roughly nine in ten that produce no charge.
Why the gap is a women's story specifically#
For a woman threatened inside her own household, the police file is not the end of the process — it is the only protective instrument the state offers before the killing. Palestinian women's organisations in Israel have argued for years that a complaint which leads nowhere teaches the next woman not to file one, and teaches whoever is threatening her that nothing follows.
This is the shape the enforcement gap takes for half the community: not only unsolved murders, but unanswered warnings.
Where it sits in the politics#
The ministry that holds the police is the national security ministry, and the 2026 campaign now runs to 27 October. Its minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, is standing on a record his party published this week as a children's book handed out at school gates.
The Abraham Initiatives keeps its count because no Israeli institution publishes an equivalent one. That is itself a finding: the deaths of Palestinian women inside Israel are tallied by a non-governmental monitor, and the tally is the record.
