Eighteen Israeli Arabs have been killed since the October 2000 riots by the security forces under circumstances unrelated to national security. Eleven of these were shot to death by cops and Border Police troops. During this period there was only one comparable case in which a cop shot to death a Jew, while trying to prevent the man from stabbing his parents.

Yesterday's casualty is not included in the grim statistics, because he was a Palestinian without an Israeli identification card.

Yet despite such dramatic data, police refuse to check whether cops have a "lighter trigger finger" when dealing with Arab suspects. For example, Nadim Milham who was killed outside his house in January 2006, was shot to death by a cop for carrying an illegal firearm. Last July, Mahmoud Ghanim of Baka al-Garbiyeh was killed after a cop suspected him of breaking into a car in Pardes Hannah. Jewish suspects in comparable circumstances have not been shot to death even though there have been dozens of confrontations during this period with Jews who were illegally armed, or with Jews suspected of breaking into cars.

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A few days ago, the Justice Ministry's Police Investigation Department (PID) decided to indict the cop who shot Milham for manslaughter.

Surprisingly, the data published here, and not for the first time, is news to the police: An investigation by Haaretz several months ago found that police do not maintain statistical data on police shootings at civilians, or about more grievous incidents in which civilians are killed in encounters with the police. Senior officials at police headquarters admitted at the time that they tried to obtain such data from police sources, but failed because "the police do not perform a breakdown of police shooting casualties by population, and address each case separately."

In six of the deaths in question, PID ruled the shootings were justified under the circumstances. The police were quick to accept these conclusions and prefered not to examine the considerations that had led cops to open fire on an Arab car thief, but to take a "softer" approach toward a Jewish thief.

Internal probes were held in every shooting incident, and the cops were brought up on charges when necessary. However, there was never any examination of the prevailing thinking among cops who deal with the Arab populace, compared to the thinking among cops trained to deal with the Jewish populace.

Senior officials in the police and Public Security Ministry recently rejected any need to look into this matter, claiming that trust had developed since 2000 between Israeli Arabs and the police. Mossawa Center for Arab Citizens of Israel, which gathered the data on Arab Israelis killed since 2000, accused the police several months ago of whitewashing attempts and "questionable" decisions to close investigations into police shootings of Arab civilians.

Police officials countered that applying statistical tools to these data is "problematic" since the police classify cases by type of offense. "Every incident is investigated on its own merit regardless of creed, race and gender, whether by PID or the police," an official said.