On Sunday night, a convoy of far-right Israeli activists, who traveled to the mixed city of Lod from locations outside municipal boundaries, launched a targeted incursion into densely populated Palestinian residential districts, triggering violent confrontations with local residents. Eyewitnesses from the Palestinian citizen community of Israel reported that the unannounced late-night procession moved through narrow neighborhood streets, hurling rocks at private properties, verbally abusing local families, and chanting overtly racist slurs targeting Arab residents.
When local Palestinian residents mobilized to confront the advancing mob, physical clashes erupted that left multiple people with minor injuries. Khaled al-Zabarqa, head of Lod’s Popular Committee, confirmed that this latest attack marks the third consecutive far-right provocation in the city in the past 30 days, following two earlier similar incidents: one staged in the vicinity of the historic Al-Omari Mosque, and a second that unfolded in Lod’s central public market. Unlike the two prior events that involved local extremist actors, Sunday’s incursion saw the outside mob go so far as to attempt a forced entry into a private Palestinian family home, al-Zabarqa told Middle East Eye.
“These extremist groups are deliberately working to blow up communal tensions across Lod to serve narrow political agendas,” al-Zabarqa emphasized, before leveling explosive accusations of state complicity against Israeli law enforcement. “We submitted formal advance warnings to police about the planned provocations and explicitly flagged the risk of violent fallout, which means authorities carry full responsibility for the harm that unfolded. Police had full advance intelligence about Sunday’s march, but instead of intervening to stop it, they positioned themselves to shield the far-right participants, and later assisted the mob members in avoiding immediate legal consequences. The consistent failure of police and state institutions to safeguard Arab residents is not an oversight — it reflects a deliberate, systemic policy of neglect and bias.”
For their part, Israeli police released a carefully calibrated statement claiming that a large gathering of dozens of individuals had assembled in Lod, with subsets of the crowd violating public order and ignoring official dispersal orders. Authorities said they deployed officers to break up the unrest and detained 11 suspects, all of whom were released on Monday morning under conditional restrictive measures while formal investigations remain ongoing. Independent reporting from Israeli outlet Haaretz revealed that the march was actively promoted on social media by far-right figures closely aligned with Israel’s ultra-nationalist National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who framed the event as a “sovereignty march” meant to assert exclusive Israeli control over the mixed city. Ben Gvir, who has emerged as one of the most high-profile political figures spearheading anti-Arab incitement in the weeks following last month’s Israeli general election — where Palestinian citizens of Israel posted record voter turnout and secured unprecedented parliamentary representation — has publicly claimed the election results were “stolen” and demanded a new national vote. Several of Ben Gvir’s most prominent loyalists, including notoriously aggressive far-right activists Mordechai David and Ziv Baranes, were documented participating in Sunday’s violent procession.
Lod’s elected mayor Yair Revivo, no ally of local Arab political factions, issued a blistering public condemnation of the outside extremist incursion. “I am seething with unbridled rage,” Revivo stated in an official release. “A mob of outsiders descended on our city, lit the fuse of communal conflict, and then vanished, leaving local authorities and our diverse resident population to clean up the catastrophic aftermath.”
Al-Zabarqa warned that the worst unrest may still lie ahead. “Our on-the-ground assessment confirms this situation is on a direct trajectory toward far more severe escalation,” he cautioned. “Anti-Arab incitement across Israeli public life has skyrocketed to unprecedented levels since October 7, but this new pattern of organized, direct violent provocations targeting Palestinian neighborhoods is a dangerous new trend that has only emerged in the past two weeks.”
Lod, referred to by its longstanding Palestinian name Lydd, hosts a large, longstanding community of Palestinian citizens of Israel — descendants of the roughly 150,000 Palestinians who remained in their ancestral homeland after the 1948 Nakba, the catastrophic displacement event where Zionist militias expelled an estimated 750,000 Palestinian people to establish the State of Israel. The city was the epicenter of some of the deadliest intercommunal violence during the 2021 nationwide mass protests that swept mixed Jewish-Arab Israeli cities: on May 11 of that year, a far-right Israeli mob shot and killed 31-year-old local Palestinian resident Musa Hassouna, while coordinated extremist attacks targeted hundreds of Palestinian homes, businesses, and mosques across the city. In the three years since that 2021 unrest, Lod has remained a frequent flashpoint for far-right and settler groups to stage deliberate provocations, including unpermitted marches through Arab residential zones, mass displays of nationalist Israeli flags in majority-Palestinian areas, and coordinated chanting of anti-Arab racist slogans.