‘This Year Shattered the Pattern’: Abuse Victim Shares Her Trauma as Femicide Incidents Among Jews Surpass Arabs in Israel
Head of Israel Observatory on Femicide tells The Media Line, “From the media, you would think the majority of victims are Arab women. In fact, there is a real rise in femicide among Jewish women.”
The number of women killed in Israel because of their gender rose again, and the pattern of who is most at risk is changing in ways that unsettle even those who have tracked femicide for years.
According to the latest annual report by the Israel Observatory on Femicide (IOF), there have been 32 femicide cases in 2025—murders in which women or girls were killed specifically because they are female. Alongside these cases, the IOF recorded an additional 12 killings of women this year that occurred in other criminal or non-gender-based circumstances.
In total, 44 women have been murdered in Israel between Jan. 1 and Nov. 18, 2025.
This marks a sharp rise from 20 femicide cases in 2024 and highlights what experts describe as the most dangerous year for women in Israel since documentation began.
Of the 32 femicides in 2025, IOF data show that 18 victims were Jewish Israeli women, while 13 were Arab Israeli women, with one additional case categorized outside those groups. By comparison, the 2024 data recorded an even split: 10 Jewish and 10 Arab victims.
These figures cap a troubling trajectory that has unfolded since 2020, a period marked by a COVID-era spike, a brief decline, and then a renewed escalation. In earlier years, Arab women were overrepresented relative to their share of the population; recent data show a relative decline in Arab femicide, alongside a marked rise among Jewish women.
Behind these numbers are two very different vantage points on the same crisis: the national monitoring work of the IOF in Jerusalem, and the daily frontline experience of the Nazareth-based organization Women Against Violence. Together, they outline a picture of a society where gender-based violence is deepening, the ethnic distribution of victims is changing, and state deterrence remains weak.
Prof. Shalva Weil, a senior researcher at the Seymour Fox School of Education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, founded the IOF in 2020 after years of documenting femicide cases and helping other countries establish observatories under a UN mandate. Her focus began with one community that stood out sharply in the data.
“It actually started with the Ethiopian Jews,” she recalled. “The first incidents I focused on were femicides among Ethiopian women, and at that time, they represented only about 0.5% of the population. So something was clearly wrong, and that’s why I decided to do something,” she said to The Media Line.
By 2020, much of the relevant information was already appearing in the Israeli media, but Weil continued to combine online monitoring with fieldwork.
“I set up the IOF, the Israel Observatory on Femicide, in 2020, after I’d already helped many countries around the world establish observatories according to the UN mandate. By 2020, a lot of information was already appearing in the media, but I was still doing interviews with people and finding additional cases that the media didn’t report,” she added.
Over the following years, the observatory began to track clear fluctuations: a rise in femicide cases during the COVID lockdowns, when offenders were released early from prison; a temporary drop as restrictions lifted; and then a steady climb again.
From the media, you would think the majority of victims are Arab women. In fact, there is a real rise in femicide among Jewish women. At the same time, there is a relative decrease among Arab women.
“During the COVID lockdowns, they released offenders—men who had beaten their wives—from jail because they didn’t want to keep people inside,” Weil noted. “Those men went home, assaulted their wives, and in some cases killed them. So there was an increase in femicide. The year afterward, when the lockdown ended, there was a decrease. 2021 was an upturn, and 2022 was a downturn. But this year is the worst year ever. I’ve been documenting femicide since 2008, and there have never been so many cases as in 2025,” she noted.
For Weil, the current year is alarming not only because of the raw numbers, but also because of who is being killed. Public perception, she argues, lags behind the data.
“My data is very different from the impression people get from the media,” she said. “From the media, you would think the majority of victims are Arab women. In fact, there is a real rise in femicide among Jewish women. At the same time, there is a relative decrease among Arab women. So this idea that it is ‘all Arab women’ is simply not true,” she added.
Another pattern she has been warning about for years is now impossible to ignore: matricide.
“The median age of the victims and the perpetrators is usually similar; the husband or boyfriend is usually just a couple of years older than the woman or the same age,” Weil explained. “What is really important this year—and I’ve been pointing this out for at least three years, but nobody listened—is the rise in what we call matricide: sons killing their mothers. This year we had six such cases. These are young men in their early 20s killing their mothers,” she added.
Weil links this trend to deeper systemic neglect of mental health.
What is really important this year—and I’ve been pointing this out for at least three years, but nobody listened—is the rise in what we call matricide: sons killing their mothers
“I wrote a very interesting article on the murder of Sarah Richardson, who was the daughter of the real-life ‘Indiana Jones.’ It’s an incredible story, and she was killed by her son,” she said. “He had severe mental health problems, and the authorities had long known he was a mental health patient. In that article, I ended by saying that the authorities are also not doing enough about mental health. These issues are connected,” she explained.
More broadly, she argues, Israel is not unique but part of a wider pattern.
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“People tend to think femicide happens mainly ‘among others,’” she said. “I don’t think that’s the real issue. Unfortunately, Israeli society, like societies in Europe and America, has become a violent society,” she said.
If Weil’s observatory provides the national map, Linda Khwaled Abo Alhof, crisis center coordinator at Women Against Violence in Nazareth, sees the same crisis from inside Arab communities. From her perspective, 2025 is also a year of escalation.
“This year, around 13 Palestinian women citizens of Israel were murdered,” she said. “It is important to say that this phenomenon is different from the general world of crime and violence that exists today in Arab society. Women are murdered because they are women. This is connected to culture and to society. We are still a conservative, masculine, patriarchal society, and that is part of the root of the problem,” she said to The Media Line.
Khwaled Abo Alhof stresses that Arab women are caught at the intersection of patriarchal norms, community stigma, and a rapidly expanding criminal underworld.
“We face physical violence, psychological violence, sexual violence, economic violence, all kinds,” she said. “Murder is the most extreme form of that violence. We also cannot deny that some women were murdered within the wider criminal world this year, and that makes it harder to classify: Was she killed because of gender, or as part of a criminal conflict?” she noted.
Like Weil, she points to the deep psychological impact of the last two years of war and crisis
We face physical violence, psychological violence, sexual violence, economic violence, all kinds,” she said. “Murder is the most extreme form of that violence.
“In the last two years we lived through a war, and that has had a deep impact on everyone’s mental state,” she said. “We are exposed to constant images of violence in the media and in daily life. Women and children are seen as the group that is more vulnerable, and some men feel empowered or dominant in ways that become dangerous. There are severe psychological pressures today, and they influence families, children, and entire communities,” she said.
She notes that, statistically, femicide among Arab women has been consistently high for years, even if this year’s proportion looks lower when compared to Jewish victims.
“Over the past years, the numbers for Arab women have been almost the same,” Khwaled Abo Alhof said. “From last year to this year, there is a bit of a decrease in the number of Arab women murdered, probably because the difficulty today is determining whether a woman was murdered because of gender or as part of the criminal world,” she added.
What has definitely changed, she argues, is the way organized crime operates.
“In the world of crime, there are no boundaries anymore,” she said. “Young men are murdered, women are murdered, entire families experience repeated victimization. We even saw cars being blown up with explosives. Some of these cases are connected to crime, and some are not, but women were once ignored by criminal organizations. Today, they are targets too, sometimes because they are seen as ‘belonging’ to someone,” she added.
Those blurred lines make Women Against Violence’s work more complicated. The organization runs a national Arab-language hotline, shelters and advocacy programs, and accompanies women and families through the legal process. The cases they see, Khwaled Abo Alhof says, are becoming more complex and more dangerous.
“In terms of age, there are young women and older women; this year we saw both,” she explained. “But the complexity of the cases we deal with has become overwhelming. At our aid center, where we support women who are victims of gender-based violence, we are now dealing with cases so complex and so severe that many women cannot even approach the authorities or hide the violence. It is heartbreaking,” she noted.
“Women reach out to us anonymously through our hotline because even when they speak and seek information, they know they cannot necessarily act on it. They fear the consequences,” she added. “There are women today who are threatened, and they do not even know who is really threatening them,” she further explained.
We are now dealing with cases so complex and so severe that many women cannot even approach the authorities or hide the violence. It is heartbreaking.
Amal, a Palestinian woman citizen of Israel, was helped by the Women Against Violence organization in Nazareth and told her testimony to The Media Line, describing years of prolonged abuse by a relative.
“It started when I was 10 years old; a relative of my family living in our same neighborhood kept abusing me. To dissuade me from talking about it with anyone, he threatened to kill my brothers with his service gun,” she said.
As an outstanding student, she recalled being stuck in the trauma of the violence and abuse she endured. After a while, her body started to show clear signs.
“I went multiple times to clinics to get myself checked, but no one really went deeper and tried to understand what was behind my unwellness,” she added.
Once she got married, she didn’t receive immediate support from her partner, despite sharing the traumatic violence she had endured, and he acted dismissively. Giving birth and raising kids became another physical and emotional struggle.
“The doctors checking me and touching me during appointments triggered in me once more the trauma, pushing me even more into a state of depression throughout my pregnancy and right after. I felt completely detached from my daughters after birth, but still no one asked me anything,” she said.
She tried to report the abuser to the authorities later, but she found out that the statute of limitations had expired. Thanks to Women Against Violence’s support and an ongoing therapeutic journey, she felt seen and managed to find the strength to tell her family after 30 years about what had happened, always fearing the possibility of judgment.
“My family felt terrible when I told them, but overall, I still feel very disappointed by the fact that neither doctors, nor my relatives, nor my partner gave the right amount of support and saw what was really going on. For years, I wanted anyone to talk to me, ask me anything. In Arab society, despite some positive changes, it is still difficult to talk about sexual and violent abuse, but the victims deserve to be seen,” she concluded.
Amal’s story shows that patterns of violent abuse could also lead to more tragic scenarios. This is why it is important that state authorities monitor these phenomena constantly. Both Weil and Khwaled Abo Alhof complained about the lack of preemptive responses and proper data monitoring.
Weil has repeatedly tried to reconcile IOF data with official police statistics and has raised questions about why many cases appear to drop out of the system.
“Last year there was a discrepancy—around 22%—between our data and the police records. That is huge,” she said.
“There are legitimate reasons for some gaps, but that does not explain the very large difference each year. We had meetings with the director general of the Ministry of National Security and the police. I gave them about 17 cases and asked what had happened with them. They never got back to me. In the end, I gave up,” she said.
According to police data, submitted by the IOF on Nov. 13, 2024, thanks to the Freedom of Information Law, there were 29 murder cases of women in Israel—nine Jewish, 18 Arab, and two foreign nationals, in comparison with 37 femicide cases reported by the IOF the same year.
When asked whether the government is doing enough to monitor and prevent femicide, she does not hesitate.
“The answer is no. A big no,” Weil said. “They have to explain why they are not doing enough,” she added.
From Nazareth, Khwaled Abo Alhof sees not only a lack of enforcement, but also clear inequalities in how the legal system treats Jewish and Arab victims.
“We conducted a study from 2008 to 2018,” she said. “Out of roughly 223 to 233 cases, 105 were Arab women and about 129 were Jewish women. Sentencing is also unequal: In cases involving Jewish women, the average sentence is around 14 to 15 years. For Arab women, the average is about 5.5 years. That tells you everything,” she said.
“Only about 15% of cases end in convictions; 85% are closed,” she added. “There is no deterrence. When there is no deterrence, the crimes continue. There may be laws, but they have no teeth. No real enforcement,” she added.
Women Against Violence continues to focus on prevention, education, and support, but Khwaled Abo Alhof is clear that NGOs cannot substitute for the state.
Only about 15% of cases end in convictions; 85% are closed. There is no deterrence. When there is no deterrence, the crimes continue. There may be laws, but they have no teeth. No real enforcement.
“We have worked for many years on raising awareness, starting from childhood—in schools, with students, with professionals,” she said. “This is our role: prevention and education. But in the police and law enforcement system, that is not our job. That is the judiciary’s job, and they are failing,” she said.
Both women also highlight how dangerous it has become for those closest to the victims to speak publicly. Khwaled Abo Alhof says that even securing anonymous testimonies from bereaved families is increasingly difficult.
“We accompany the families of murdered women throughout the criminal process, but this is a very small number,” she explained. “Most families want to end the process quickly and do not want to attend court sessions. Many fear retaliation. We tried many times to connect families with journalists, but they usually refuse. Even anonymously, they are afraid. They do not feel safe at all. The fear is enormous,” she said.
From her desk in Jerusalem, Weil watches the IOF’s database grow year after year. From Nazareth, Khwaled Abo Alhof listens to voices on the phone who may never appear in any official report.
Both agree that without a stronger, more equal and more professional state response—one that acknowledges the different risks faced by Jewish and Arab women, addresses mental health and crime, and enforces the law consistently—the next reports are likely to tell an even darker story.
