Two people were shot and killed hours apart from one another in the Tel Aviv area on Saturday night, in incidents the police are treating as criminally motivated.
At around 8 p.m., Amir al-Hawa, a 28-year-old resident of Lod, was fatally shot in a parking lot in northern Tel Aviv.
He was taken in critical condition to Ichilov Hospital, where he succumbed to his wounds.
According to reports, police suspect the shooting was part of a conflict between two families in the city.
A witness to the incident told the Ynet news site that the victim had tried to escape his attackers, weaving his car around other vehicles in the parking lot. She said that after he was shot, he lost control of his vehicle and it crashed into her parked car.
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Around two hours later, police said that another man had been fatally shot in Jaffa, in a separate homicide incident.
Police carry out searches in Jaffa for the suspected perpetrator of a deadly shooting in the area on November 8, 2025. (Israel Police)
The shooting victim was brought by car to Wolfson Hospital by an unknown driver, who promptly left the scene. The man, a Jaffa resident in his 20s identified as Hussein Samouni, was declared dead by medical staff after arriving.
Officers in Jaffa were searching for suspects near the scene of the shooting, which was carried out close to the victim’s home.
The Abraham Initiatives, a coexistence organization that tracks crime statistics, said that the two incidents brought the number of Arabs killed in violent and criminal incidents in Israel since the start of 2025 to 223 — 220 Israeli citizens and three residents.
Of that number, it said, 189 were shot to death, 11 of them by police officers.
It said 112 of the victims were aged 30 and under, and five were below the age of 18. Twenty of the victims were women.
According to the organization, in the same time period last year, 204 people were killed in violent and criminal incidents, meaning there has been a 9-percent increase in 2025.
Since 2023, the number of Arab Israelis violently killed has been double that of preceding years, with many blaming the rampant homicides on a lack of deterrence. Police have failed to solve most murder cases in the Arab sector, allowing violent crime to go unpunished.
Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.
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