Palestinians in Israel
Times of Palestine opens a daily file on the Palestinians inside Israel
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
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Two million Palestinians hold Israeli citizenship — a fifth of the state's population, the people who stayed on their land in 1948 and their descendants. Their story runs daily through this new section: the citizens whose taxes fund a state that counts them, in file after file, as a threat.
A killing a day, and no one charged#
The community is living through the deadliest violence in its history. Gun crime killed 252 of its people in 2025, the worst year ever recorded, the Abraham Initiatives documented — and 2026 is running ahead of it, past 140 dead by mid-year, a twelve percent rise.
The state's answer is measured in indictments: sixteen filed for the year's first half of killings, the Times of Israel reported from the watchdog's data — a solve rate near twelve percent, against roughly 65 percent when the victim is Jewish. Most of the guns, researchers trace to army and police stockpiles.
The workforce treated as a suspect#
Palestinian citizens are roughly 40 percent of Israel's health workforce — the doctors, nurses and pharmacists its hospitals cannot run without. Since October 2023 that dependence has curdled into surveillance: medics investigated and dismissed over social-media posts, and this month an incitement campaign against Palestinian staff at Haifa's Rambam hospital over unproven claims that included speaking Arabic on the ward, Middle East Eye reported.
The pattern is wider than medicine. The Haifa-based legal center Adalah has documented hundreds of interrogations, dismissals and prosecutions of Palestinian citizens over speech since October 7 — posts, poems, even prayers.
The Naqab, the vote, the file#
In the Naqab, tens of thousands live in villages the state refuses to recognize, under demolition orders that arrive faster than any court hears them. And in the Knesset arithmetic ahead of October's election, the same community both blocs court and refuse holds the seats that decide who governs — the kingmaker paradox our election desk tracks.
This section reports all of it daily, in both languages: the crime file, the land file, the speech file, the vote. Wire items from the community's own press route here automatically, and the desk files when the wire runs quiet.
The people who never left are not a minority story on this site. They are the front page's third column, every day.
