With two and a half weeks still remaining until the end of the year, it is already clear that this has become the bloodiest year ever for Israel’s Arab society. Overnight between Thursday and Friday, 19-year-old Riad Salam was shot dead in the village of Deir Hanna in the Lower Galilee.
Magen David Adom teams evacuated Salam in critical condition while performing resuscitation efforts to Poriya Medical Center in Tiberias, where doctors pronounced him dead.
Salam is the 245th person murdered in Arab society since the beginning of the year, breaking the grim record set in 2023, the first year of National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir’s tenure, when 244 people were killed. The year before that saw 237 victims, which was also considered one of the bloodiest years on record. The current figure has now reached an unprecedented level.
The numbers are staggering compared with previous years, which were themselves marked by high levels of violence. In 2018, 71 people were murdered in Arab society. After a steady rise, the number peaked at 126 in 2021, the highest figure at the time. In 2022, during the tenure of then-public security minister Omer Bar-Lev and amid a special program to combat violence, the number fell to 109. After Ben Gvir took office, the death toll more than doubled, reaching a record high overnight.
According to initial reports, Salam left his home after gunfire was heard in the neighborhood. He began shouting and was then shot and killed. He is survived by his twin brother and two additional siblings who are also twins, a brother and a sister.
Police officers who were called to the scene opened an investigation into the circumstances of the killing and launched searches for suspects involved in the shooting.
Salam’s grandfather said the family was devastated. “He was a good, normal kid. He was murdered in cold blood,” he said. “There was gunfire, his father asked him not to go outside, but he went to see where they were shooting and was killed. We lost one of the best young people. I tell Ben Gvir to stop dealing with home demolitions and start dealing with crime. We have been abandoned.”
Two days earlier, Imad Bakarna, 36, a resident of the village of Tur’an in the Lower Galilee, was shot dead inside a liquor store. Another man, 32, was moderately wounded in the shooting. Bakarna was taken to the hospital, where doctors pronounced him dead. Police suspect he had entered the shop to make a purchase and was shot inside the store in front of staff.
A day before that, Mohammed Agbaria, a garage owner from Musmus, was shot dead in Ma’ale Iron in the Wadi Ara area. Officers from the Umm al-Fahm police station set up roadblocks in an effort to locate suspects.