Two decades ago, a high-profile assassination attempt on one of Israel’s most notorious Jewish crime bosses reshaped the entire national approach to organised criminal networks. In December 2003, a powerful bomb detonated in central Tel Aviv, targeting Zeev Rosenstein. Rosenstein survived the attack – the seventh attempt on his life – but three innocent bystanders were killed. At the time, the violence unfolded against the backdrop of the Second Intifada, and laid bare the expanding influence of criminal underworld groups, sparking public outrage across the country. To address this growing threat, then-prime minister Ariel Sharon’s government introduced sweeping reforms that would redefine how Israel tackled organised crime, reclassifying it not as a routine law enforcement challenge, but a strategic threat to the nation’s social and economic stability. The cabinet passed Resolution 4618, which established an aggressive, cross-agency strategy uniting the Israeli Police, Tax Authority, State Attorney’s Office and anti-money laundering and terror financing watchdog. Unlike previous enforcement efforts that focused on arresting low-level street operatives, the new policy targeted the financial backbone that allowed large syndicates to operate. A complementary resolution, 4619, laid the legal groundwork for a permanent Witness Protection Authority, while significant funding was allocated to expand elite enforcement units. Together, these reforms gave law enforcement a far broader toolkit of legal, operational and financial resources to dismantle major criminal networks. At the time of the crackdown, Israel’s most powerful organised crime groups were overwhelmingly led by Jewish figures, operating across domestic and global markets, with many counting among the most wanted targets of the FBI and Interpol. The Abergil syndicate, for example, was labelled a major international criminal organisation by U.S. authorities. Over the following years, sustained cross-border cooperation and aggressive enforcement delivered tangible results: four of the six largest Jewish criminal groups – including the Rosenstein, Abergil, Abutbul and Shirazi organisations – were fully dismantled or left severely weakened, while the remaining two linked to Shalom Domrani and the Mosly family survived only as fragmented, far less powerful entities. In this same era, organised crime in Palestinian communities within Israel remained a relatively marginal phenomenon, concentrated primarily in poorer neighborhoods of historic mixed cities such as Jaffa, Ramla, Lod and Acre, where many Palestinian families who remained in the territory after the 1948 Nakba lived under persistent socioeconomic hardship. For most Arab towns and villages, large-scale organised criminal activity was largely unheard of. But as Jewish organised crime networks collapsed, a power vacuum began to emerge, and criminal activity gradually shifted into Palestinian communities, where the conditions allowed syndicates to grow rapidly: weak state presence, limited routine policing, widespread access to illegal firearms, systemic economic marginalisation and vulnerable local government institutions. The most devastating measure of this shift can be seen in the soaring homicide rate. In 2015, 58 people were murdered in Palestinian communities across Israel. By 2019, that number climbed to 89. In 2024, it hit 230, and rose again to 254 in 2025. What began as a peripheral criminal issue has grown into one of the most pressing political and social crises facing Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up roughly 20% of the country’s total population. The disparity in violence is compounded by a equally stark gap in law enforcement outcomes. In 2025, more than 80% of all murder victims in Israel were Palestinian citizens. In 2024, only 15 to 18% of homicides in Palestinian communities were solved, compared to a clearance rate of more than 50% for murders in Jewish communities. That means more than four out of five killings in Arab areas go unsolved, highlighting a systemic gap in equal protection under the law. The per capita disparity is even more striking. A 2023 academic study comparing homicide rates in Palestinian and Jewish Israeli communities to OECD standards found the homicide rate for Palestinian citizens stood at roughly 11 per 100,000 people, while the rate for Jewish Israelis was just 0.64 per 100,000. The gap has also widened dramatically: before 2015, the ratio of homicides in Palestinian versus Jewish communities was roughly 4 to 1; by 2023, it had grown to 13 to 1. This crisis extends far beyond the realm of criminal justice. It has evolved into a fundamental question of equal citizenship, state accountability, political representation and the unequal distribution of basic security. Today, multiple large criminal syndicates operate openly in Palestinian communities across Israel, with activities spanning drug trafficking, protection racketeering, predatory high-interest lending, extortion, weapons smuggling, and increasingly sophisticated efforts to seize control of public resources. In recent years, these groups have expanded their reach into local government, seeking influence over municipal elections, intimidating elected officials, pressuring public tender committees and infiltrating public contracting processes. Sectors including waste management, recycling, construction, transportation and public education budgets have become major targets for criminal revenue streams. Organised crime is no longer confined to activity outside of state institutions; in many Palestinian communities, syndicates have embedded themselves within public governance, bending systems to serve their own profit and power. They control which businesses win municipal contracts, which candidates can safely run for office, and how public funds are distributed, allowing their influence to reshape every aspect of daily economic, political and social life in affected areas. The 2025 municipal crisis in Nazareth, one of Israel’s largest Arab-majority cities, illustrates how deeply criminal groups have penetrated public institutions. A major waste management and municipal finance scandal erupted that year, with criminal organisations suspected of infiltrating municipal systems and gaining control over lucrative public contracts. The investigation ultimately led to the arrest of sitting mayor Ali Salam. Similar patterns have emerged in smaller towns including Arraba, where a local mayor uncovered massive irregularities in municipal spending, discovering the town was paying drastically inflated prices for routine services such as waste collection. After repeatedly appealing to national state authorities for intervention, the mayor’s home was targeted in a gun attack, and he received repeated death threats for his efforts to root out criminal influence. These cases expose a central contradiction of the crisis: the state demands local Arab leaders resist organised crime infiltration, but offers little to no protection for officials who confront powerful syndicates. The Abu Latif organisation, based in the Druze town of Rameh, exposes deeper complexities of the crisis. Many members of the extended Abu Latif family have served in Israeli security institutions, a common career path for Druze citizens, but the group has been accused of directly challenging state authority. As early as 2001, family members were arrested on serious security charges, including operating as foreign agents, providing assistance to Hezbollah, and smuggling weapons, explosives and drugs from Lebanon into Israel. In subsequent years, the organisation was found to have infiltrated even sensitive Israeli state economic structures, with investigations alleging members used extortion and threats to win control over Ministry of Defense and Israeli military construction tenders, including infrastructure projects along the Lebanese border and facilities tied to the Israeli Air Force. Members of the organisation were quoted in court testimony as telling victims, “We are the state.” That stark claim cuts to the core of the crisis: organised crime does not merely operate in the gaps of state authority; it seeks to replace that authority, exploiting public budgets and building its own parallel systems of power through fear and violence. Another layer of the crisis stems from Israel’s longstanding practice of relying on Palestinian collaborators from the occupied West Bank and Gaza. When a collaborator’s identity is exposed, they can no longer safely remain in their home community, so the Israeli state often relocates them and their families to Palestinian towns and mixed cities inside Israel’s 1948 borders, frequently under new identities. Many of these relocated individuals face precarious legal and socioeconomic status, with limited access to stable citizenship, public services, formal employment and long-term social support. Left marginalized in already disadvantaged Palestinian communities, some eventually become involved in local criminal networks. The issue sparked major controversy in 2021, when a senior Israeli police official publicly acknowledged that law enforcement investigations were often hampered by the fact that some individuals involved in serious violent crime also worked as informants or collaborators for Israeli security agencies. According to the official, the protection afforded to these individuals because of their intelligence work often limits police ability to investigate or prosecute them, creating a direct conflict between two branches of the Israeli state: the security establishment, which prioritizes protecting intelligence sources, and the police, which is tasked with combating crime. For Palestinian residents of violence-affected communities, this bureaucratic conflict has tangible, deadly consequences: serious criminal actors are often left beyond the reach of routine law enforcement. The rise of organised crime in Palestinian communities cannot be separated from the broader political marginalization of Palestinian citizens in Israel. Even before Itamar Ben Gvir was appointed Minister of National Security, police response to violence in Arab communities was widely criticized for systemic neglect, institutional discrimination, low clearance rates and pervasive anti-Palestinian stereotyping. Under Ben Gvir’s tenure, these problems have acquired a new, more explicit political dimension: his time in office has been defined by efforts to reshape police leadership, promote officers aligned with his far-right ideological worldview, and prioritize policing according to his political agenda. The outcome of these policies is clear: homicide rates in Palestinian communities have continued to climb steadily. At the start of 2026, the unaddressed crisis sparked one of the largest mass mobilizations by Palestinian citizens in Israel in recent history. The catalyst was a conflict in the northern Arab city of Sakhnin, where a bakery owner refused to continue paying protection money to a local criminal syndicate. Rather than submit to extortion, he announced he would close his business and lay off all his workers. His decision sparked a mass collective revolt. Business owners, ordinary residents, activists and local leaders joined the movement, and on January 22, tens of thousands of demonstrators gathered in Sakhnin, while the entire city shut down in a general strike against organised crime and state failure to address the crisis. The protest spread rapidly beyond Sakhnin, with Palestinian political leadership calling for a mass demonstration in Tel Aviv that drew tens of thousands more participants. For the first time, the crisis of organised crime became a central, unifying collective political demand for Palestinian citizens of Israel. Yet despite the unprecedented scale of the mobilization, criminal organisations continued to operate unimpeded, and homicide rates showed no significant decline. In response to growing public pressure, the Israeli government recently moved to deploy the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, to lead counter-crime efforts in Palestinian communities. The decision has drawn widespread opposition from Palestinian political leaders, civil society groups, legal experts and even former Israeli security officials. Critics do not argue that criminal organisations should be left unchallenged; instead, they warn of the danger of deploying an intelligence service built to counter national security threats to police a marginalized civilian minority community. The move has become even more controversial following the appointment of David Zini as head of the Shin Bet, a choice widely criticized for Zini’s extreme ideological positions and close political alignment with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The result is a dangerous framing of the crisis: a civilian population demanding equal access to basic police protection is increasingly treated as a national security threat. None of these dynamics can be separated from the deep socioeconomic inequality that shapes life for most Palestinian citizens of Israel. Large segments of Palestinian society continue to face systemic poverty, underfunded public infrastructure, chronic housing shortages, limited formal employment opportunities, and chronic underinvestment in education and local government. At the same time, decades of neoliberal economic policy in Israel have reshaped internal dynamics within Palestinian society: a small, growing Palestinian middle class has emerged, with more Palestinians accessing higher education and entering professional sectors including technology, medicine, law and business. But this economic mobility has been deeply uneven, and economic inequality within Palestinian society itself has widened dramatically. While a small segment has benefited from integration into the Israeli economy, large segments remain trapped in persistent poverty, unemployment, underfunded education systems and geographically marginalized communities. A 2023 report from the Israeli State Comptroller highlights this gap: roughly 25% of Arab men and 34% of Arab women between the ages of 18 and 24 are neither employed nor enrolled in education or vocational training, rates far higher than those for Jewish young people. Large numbers of disconnected young people, growing up without access to stable opportunity or political hope, create fertile ground for criminal organisations to recruit new members. Organised crime fills the gaps left by state failure and economic exclusion: it offers income where the formal economy provides none, creates jobs where legitimate opportunities are absent, extends credit where banks refuse to lend, and wields power where state institutions are weak or unaccountable. This is why the explosion of organised crime in Palestinian society cannot be reduced to a purely social or criminal problem. While targeted law enforcement is a necessary component of any solution – including confiscating illegal weapons, dismantling syndicates, disrupting money laundering networks and prosecuting killers – policing alone cannot explain why organised crime grew exponentially in Palestinian communities even as it declined dramatically in Jewish Israeli society. The roots of the crisis lie in the intersection of multiple interconnected processes: the successful dismantling of major Jewish criminal networks following the 2003 reforms, decades of systemic underinvestment in Arab localities, chronic under-policing and low public trust in law enforcement, widespread availability of illegal firearms, deep socioeconomic inequality, the persistent political marginalization of Palestinian citizens, and the contradictions created by Israel’s broader security policies toward Palestinians. Together, these factors have transformed what began as a local criminal issue into a fundamental political crisis. For Palestinian citizens of Israel, the core question is no longer whether police can arrest individual criminal leaders. The deeper, unresolved question is why the Israeli state, which proved it could dismantle powerful organised crime networks in Jewish communities, has failed for more than a decade to deliver the same level of basic security to its Palestinian citizens. That question inevitably leads to a broader, more fundamental challenge to the nature of Israeli democracy: what does equal citizenship mean when the state’s ability and willingness to provide the most fundamental public good – personal security – varies so drastically between different groups of its citizens?
