Ten-year-old S. asks to go outside to play while her mother talks about the murder of her father. It is hard for her to hear again about the day everything changed. She was a young child when her father, a resident of Jisr az-Zarqa, left his home and noticed young men fighting. When he tried to separate them, one of them, a minor, stabbed him to death.
It was a random murder, senseless and futile, that left almost no mark on public consciousness: That month alone, five more people were murdered in Arab society. But for S., her father’s death is an entire world. Her mother, F., had recently given birth to her fourth child at the time. The father’s death left the family without its main breadwinner and without family backing.
Gallery
Two girls who were orphaned by their parents due to violence in Arab society
(Photo: Gil Nehushtan)
“I am holding on only for the children,” F. says. Her sentences are short and measured. She holds herself together so as not to fall apart as she describes the fears her children still face. “They prefer to stay home,” she says. They are afraid to go outside, perhaps fearing that a fate similar to their father’s awaits them too.
Sitting beside S. is Arifa. Her family, too, is a victim of the rampant violence in Arab society: About two years ago, her daughter, Sumaya, was murdered by her husband, the father of her children. When Arifa begins to speak about that black day, her 9-year-old granddaughter R. also asks to leave the room.
“She doesn’t like it when I talk about it,” Arifa says. It is easy to understand why. R. was a first grader when the violent murder took place. Even before then, she herself had been a victim of the severe violence that prevailed in the home — violence that led Sumaya to file several police complaints against her husband.
On the day of the murder, the father told R. and her siblings that their mother had gone to work — even though the children saw that her car keys had been left at home. Later, he tried to claim that the mother had left the house.
“I received a message on my phone: ‘Mom, I went to Sharm with a friend,’” Arifa recalls. “Out of fear, I threw the phone. I knew it wasn’t true — she would not leave the children and go. There is no such thing.” Arifa suspected from the first moment that something bad had happened.
F. and her daughter S., Arifa and her granddaughter R.
(Photo: Gil Nehushtan)
“He was always beating her, the children,” she says. Security cameras outside a nearby store revealed the truth: Sumaya had been brutally murdered before dawn, and her husband hid her body in the trunk of the car. He then drove the children, in that same car, to his parents. From there, he drove to a pit that had been prepared in advance and buried Sumaya’s body.
“He brought disaster on us, disaster,” Arifa says. “It is a miracle that I am standing on my feet.”
Since then, the four children have been living with Arifa. She never imagined that at this stage of her life — while also caring for a husband in need of nursing care — she would return to raising young children. The trauma the children experienced affects every aspect of their lives: in school, in nightmares. Arifa, who received foster family status for her grandchildren, does not give up: She insists on therapy, drives them to doctors and to every place where she can find help for the children.
Without income or support
The wave of crime and violence in Arab society, and the ease with which guns and knives are used, have long since seeped into public consciousness. The Israeli media count the dead and demand answers from the police and the government. But it seems the true meaning behind the growing lists of murder victims has still not been fully absorbed: The circles of harm are far wider than the victims themselves.
They include those wounded by gunfire — often passersby, or people pulled against their will into cycles of revenge despite being law-abiding citizens — eyewitnesses, and the relatives of the victims: parents, siblings, widows and orphans. Many, many orphans.
The year 2026 is not yet over, and in Arab society more than 100 children and teenagers have already been left without a parent because of murder. According to monitoring by the Sunflowers Association, which supports orphans from all parts of Israeli society, about 130 of the recent murder cases since the start of the calendar year have left 114 girls and boys under 18 orphaned — nearly half of them toddlers and very young children up to age 6. Often, as in the case of F. and her daughter S., they are left without the family’s main source of income and without family support. The great fear, according to Sunflowers, is that these children will join the cycle of crime and violence in the not-too-distant future.
“A child who saw how his father was murdered, whose mother is forced to live only on a survivor’s allowance, who has no other male role model at home — his chances of joining the cycle of crime increase,” says Hadar Kass, CEO of Sunflowers.
The organization operates 10 centers in Arab society, with activities intended for orphans and the surviving parent. These are not individual therapy sessions, but groups in which the children meet for shared activities — art, cooking and sports — through which, with professional guidance, they gradually open up and are able to speak a little more about their loss.
“The demand is enormous,” Kass says.
“At school they don’t always understand. They’re not like me,” S. says. In the group, however, all the children have lost a parent, and there is a shared language. R. says she did not want to come to the meetings at first. “I had to convince her,” Arifa says. Today, however, she refuses to miss a meeting.
Among other things, the children talk in the meetings about their dreams: S. wants to be a doctor. R. dreams of becoming a lawyer, “so they will know I am strong,” she says. One can only imagine the connection between the professional dream and the trauma they experienced in early childhood.
When R.’s younger brother was asked in the group meeting what his dream was, he answered plainly: “My dream is Mom. I dream about her all the time. I want to see her,” says Khadra Jarbaan, director of the center in Jisr az-Zarqa.
Jarbaan serves at the center as a professional supporting the families of victims, but almost in passing, it emerges that she herself is also a victim of the rampant violence: About four years ago, a criminal who fired indiscriminately in the street hit her son while he was playing in the yard. Her son was wounded in the leg, and his soul has remained wounded ever since.
The responses are not enough
The responses available to children orphaned by murder and other children who have fallen victim to the widening circles of rampant violence in Arab society are very partial and far from sufficient. Sunflowers’ work relies on philanthropic donations, and the support it is able to provide is not a substitute for individual mental health treatment.
The scene of a double murder in Netanya
(Photo: Aner Green)
The Welfare Ministry operates 10 assistance centers for bereaved families affected by sudden death, from traffic accidents to murder. Two of them operate in Arab society. In response to an inquiry from ynet and Yedioth Ahronoth, the Welfare Ministry said that over the past year about 7,500 people were treated at these centers, but it could not say how many of them came from Arab society.
F. remembers that her family received psychological assistance at the beginning, but it was short-term help. Today, about four years after the murder, she has been left alone in the struggle with the anxiety, the difficulties in school and the fight for economic survival.
“The systems are not looking reality in the eye, and therefore it is not urgent for them to find solutions,” says Rawia Khandaklo, CEO of Elaf — the Center for Promoting Safety in Arab Society.
The responses for murder orphans are similar to those intended for any child who has experienced loss, but the large number of cases, alongside the fact that Arab society has a structural shortage of mental health therapists, requires, in her view, a broad dedicated program to address the issue.
“We are in a major event that requires systemic change,” she says. “The loss of a parent under these circumstances is twice as hard — because often the family does not even know who murdered the father, does not know whether the rest of the family members are still under threat. Very often, the women are in deep unemployment and the burden of supporting the family falls on them. In such a situation, it is easy to ‘hunt’ these people back into the cycles of crime.”