On a Tuesday evening in November, Nabil did not return home. Actually, his father says, the 15-year-old just wanted to take a short break from studying for the biology exam the next day. He was waiting in a car for his cousin in front of a pizza shop when a motorcycle drove by. Shortly afterwards, Ashraf Safiya received a call: “Shots in Kfar Jasif. Nabil was shot.« Kfar Jasif is a town with around 10,000 inhabitants in northern Israel, where the family lives. The father and his wife immediately drove to the crime scene, then on to the hospital. There they found out: Nabil had been fatally shot. The police are investigating. She assumes there was a mix-up.
Nabil's death shocked and angered the community. There were spontaneous protests. Nabil's classmates went on strike. After almost a week, Ashraf Safiya took his son's school bag, put on his jacket and went to school. He sat down in the classroom, in the seat that would remain empty from now on. »I wanted the students to learn again and symbolically end the strike. At the same time, I wanted to make a mark of memory for my son,” says Safiya.
Violence rages in the towns and villages of Israel's Arab minority. In 2025, 252 Arab citizens of Israel were killed, according to the Abraham Initiative, an Israeli-Palestinian NGO. By mid-September this year, according to Israeli media counts, there had already been 176 deaths - roughly one homicide every 35 hours. Most of the victims are young men. Among Jewish Israelis, however, the rate is an average of 50 to 60 deaths per year. For 2025, that means around 11.6 homicides per 100,000 Arab citizens and 0.7 per 100,000 Jewish Israelis.
The escalating violence is not only affecting Arab society, it is also politicizing it. Many see the cause as the inaction of the Israeli police. The protests in Kfar Jasif first spread to the surrounding region and then to the entire country. In January, up to 50,000 people took to the streets in Sakhnin, one of the largest Arab towns in northern Israel. A few days later, 40,000 demonstrated in Tel Aviv - one of the largest joint Arab-Jewish protests in the country's history.
In the parliamentary elections due in October, the problem of crime could mobilize the Arab population, which makes up around 20 percent, like no other issue. According to a survey, almost three quarters say that it is a decisive factor in their voting decision. For the first time in its history, the most influential Arab party Ra'am has placed a Jewish candidate in second place on the list: Yoav Segalovich - a former police officer who successfully pushed forward the fight against crime in the Arab sector under the previous government. The opposition could rely on Arab votes to replace Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government. The situation of the Arab-Israeli community has taken on national importance.
A few days after Safiya went to his son's school, his phone rang. Israeli President Isaac Herzog spoke up. He wanted to meet Safiya.
Nabil is omnipresent in the Safiyas' house. Nabil stands as a small statue on the sideboard under the television, Nabil hangs larger than life as a poster in the hallway. You can see photos of him on every cupboard and on every wall: Nabil on vacation, Nabil with his soccer team, Nabil with his siblings, Nabil with his mother. Ashraf Safiya sits on the couch and keeps flashing his lighter. “You should do what the doctor says – and not imitate what the doctor himself does,” says the 51-year-old dentist as he lights the next cigarette.
Most families of victims withdraw, says Safiya. "We went public in the hour after the murder," he explains. His wife and daughter sit next to him on the couch and listen. National media picked up Nabil's story - and eventually the Israeli president called. In February he met with Safiya and other victims' families. The father does not want to say what exactly Herzog and Safiya discussed. All that matters to him is that he was heard. The Israeli police investigated correctly simply because of the media attention, says Safiya: "Now my son's murderer is actually coming to court." In this case, it took the police barely a month to present a main suspect.
